Each time someone views one of your Web pages, a certain amount of data is sent over our network connections. Bandwidth is the amount of data sent for your account.

“Unlimited bandwidth” means we never charge extra fees for high bandwidth use.

It’s similar to unlimited minutes on your cell phone plan, or unlimited mileage in a rental car contract. You get peace of mind knowing that you’ll never be hit with the unexpected fees some hosting companies charge.

Does “unlimited” mean “infinite”?

“Unlimited” refers to billing, not to physical limits. (We actually don’t like the phrase “unlimited bandwidth”, even though it’s the standard term in the Web hosting industry. A better description might be “unmetered bandwidth”.)

Like all Web hosting companies, we do have restrictions on how fast your site can send data at any moment in time, and that does impose a physical limit on how many bytes you could send per month. The limit is very high, but it does exist.

Most companies are very vague about what these restrictions are — they’ll say something like “we don’t limit the speed as long as the server can handle it and your site doesn’t negatively impact other sites”, making it difficult to know whether (or when) you’ll have problems. We don’t think that’s fair, so we tell you exactly what our policy is up front.

Bandwidth speed policy

We allow normal sites to temporarily “burst” up to 100 Mbps (that’s 100 megabits per second, the speed of a “Fast Ethernet” connection). All our servers have 1000 Mbps connections (gigabit Ethernet), so even a large temporary spike like this doesn’t cause problems for other customers on the same server.

However, the combined bandwidth of all your sites shouldn’t average more than 10 Mbps for more than two hours a month. If that happens, we’ll restrict them to 10 Mbps to lower the future average.

We should emphasize that we almost never actually restrict anyone. Even if a site becomes extremely popular due to a listing on a site like Digg.com, it rarely uses more than 10 Mbps even at the peak — and the ability to burst to far higher speeds for a couple of hours (about the length of a Digg listing) means you shouldn’t have trouble anyway.

If you did send data at 10 Mbps for an entire month, that would add up to about 3200 GB (3.2 terabytes), so that’s the physical limit. But for comparison, the average site we host uses less than 1 GB, and 99.98% of the sites we host use less than 1000 GB.

The bottom line is that all our hosting plans offer far more bandwidth than any normal site should ever need — and you don’t need to worry about being charged extra fees, no matter what happens.

What’s a “normal site”?

You may have noticed that we say “normal sites” are eligible for the speeds mentioned above.

A “normal site” is one that uses bandwidth as a routine side-effect of its operation. Almost every site qualifies.

The only sites that don’t meet this definition are sites where consuming bandwidth is the main reason for the site to exist. For example, a file download mirror site designed to minimize bandwidth usage elsewhere wouldn’t qualify.

If you’re setting up a site like that, please contact us for bandwidth pricing (we can offer you speeds higher than normal sites are allowed, too).

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