In IT jargon unmetered referrers to something that is unmonitored and the usage of the same product/service is not measured. This leads us to unmetered hosting.
Unmetered hosting means that your hosting or dedicated server have unmetered traffic
What is unmetered hosting?
But unmetered does not mean unlimited! While many hosting companies tend to trick their clients by advertising unlimited services we at BlackHOST want to keep our records straight. Apart from obvious hardware limitations such as CPU, RAM, HDD the true limit of the unmetered hosting plans, unmetered VPS services, and unmetered Dedicated servers lies in the bandwidth of the service. In this blog post, we will cover some basic subjects about traffic and bandwidth so you can better understand the whole unmetered concept.
What Is the Difference Between Traffic & Bandwidth?
When you buy a server, you can choose specifications relating to the amount of traffic included in the server package. It doesn’t matter if you’re buying a dedicated server, VPS, or shared hosting. With the number and variety of hosting providers in the market, you can always find a provider who gives a clear picture of what to expect in terms of traffic limits, data transfer speed, and pricing.
Traffic or sometimes called data transfer is the volume of data passed between your server and the public web over a certain period, usually 1 month.
Many hosting providers usually can misplace the true traffic limitations as bandwidth. For instance, when they say “Bandwidth: 10TB/month” they actually refer to that the monthly traffic limit is 10TB.
Bandwidth is defined as the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time. For digital devices, the bandwidth is usually expressed in bits per second(bps) or bytes per second. However, in hosting environments we usually measure it in Megabits per second (Mbps) and Gigabits per second (Gbps). Hosting bandwidth typically ranges between 10Mbps and 1Gbps, with 100Mbps a common bandwidth for high-performance dedicated servers.
Bandwidth is sometimes referred to by the size of the port. For example, a dedicated server with a dedicated 100Mbps port affords you 100Mbps bandwidth. However, in real case usage, the actual throughput can be slightly smaller than the actual bandwidth due to hardware limitations, or BGP routing.
Why UNMETERED != UNLIMITED
When you buy unmetered hosting, unmetered VPS, or unmetered dedicated servers it’s important to understand one thing. You are not buying unlimited traffic! Traffic is always limited, in practice, by the other factors: time and bandwidth.
Traffic (MB) = Time ( s) * Bandwidth (Mpbs) / 8
Formula for calculating traffic for N time for given bandwidth
We’ve come up with this formula to better understand the traffic limitations on unmetered hosting services. This basically means that the true traffic limit in MB is defined by the bandwidth consumed in MB (1 MB/s = 8 Mbps) in a specific time period.
Which leads us to the following monthly limitation table for the unmetered services:
| Bandwidth | Monthly traffic |
| 10 Mbps | ~ 3.3 TB |
| 100 Mbps | ~ 33 TB |
| 1 Gbps | ~ 330 TB |
| 10 Gbps | ~ 3300 TB |
The monthly traffics shown in this table are actually the theoretical limits for the corresponding bandwidth upstream. But in real usage, they might be slightly lower. Also for achieving the speeds of 1Gbps 10Gbps you will need a good server configuration.
Why Do You Need UNMETERED Hosting Solution?
There are several reasons why having unmetered traffic might be important for you:
- Unexpected traffic on your page. Sometimes your site might experience global “publicity” which will lead to increased visits/traffic on your site which can really exhaust your traffic limit very quickly, which will lead to service suspension or at least disruption. With the unmetered traffic plans your only limit will be on the throughput from your bandwidth which can be very high and won’t lead to service suspension.
- DDoS attacks. You can easily become a target of some random or intentional DDoS attack, which is also unexpected traffic to your site which again can lead to exhausting your traffic limit. Also having a higher bandwidth plan can help you handle most of the DDoS attacks coming to your server, so for example if your site usually is consuming 100Mbps traffic and all of sudden you experience some kind of attack from 500Mbps having a 1Gbps bandwidth plan will enable your site to function properly and give you time and liberty to take action against this attacks.
- High overuse bills. Overusing your traffic limit can sometimes lead you to very high bills at the end of the month with some providers.
- Cheaper traffic prices. Unmetered traffic plans usually offer lower pricing than the other “dynamic” packages where you can upgrade your monthly traffic limits.
How to Choose What’s Best for You?
First of all, you need to understand what are your current needs and what might be your needs in the future. Then you should contact your web hosting provider support team and inform better for their products services. Ask them about their upstream provider and see where their services are located, check for latency from your client location to their services, etc.
We at BlackHOST are always trying hard to provide as much information as possible about our services on our web. Also, we’re always happy to assist you and answer all the questions you might have about any of our services or products. All you need to do is to contact our support. Or you can check out our unmetered shared hosting plans, unmetered VPS hosting plans and our unmetered dedicated servers with speeds up to 10Gbps.
