"Bandwith Limit Exceeded"

If you spend any time surfing you have probably encountered this message. This can often occur right in the middle of trying to purchase from a website.

First understand what bandwith is. Bandwith is the data transfer from your website. You can compare it to cell phone minutes or an electrical meter. Each page that is viewed uses a certain amount of bandwith. Most hosting plans sell the website owner a certain amount of data transfer for the month. Sort of like prepaid cell phone minutes.

When a website runs out of credits or minutes the website become unavailable to visitors just like your cell phone would stop working often in the middle of a call.

Unfortunately, the website owner has no idea that the website is down and has no control of who is viewing pages. If the business owner runs an ad in the newspaper, and people come to see the website it is not viewable, because too many people went to it and used up all the bandwith.

It would be the same as running TV commercials for a big sale and then locking your doors after lunch and not opening until the 1st of the next month. Needless to say, that would be business suicide. And so is limiting your bandwith because you bought the cheapest hosting plan to save money.

So why would anyone buy a limited plan. One word, COST!. If you have thousands of people show up at your website, you could pay thousands of dollars in fees for bandwith. If you used your cellphone for business and spent hundreds of hours talking to people you would have to pay hundreds of dollars in extra fees. The same applies with your website.

There are only a few companies that offer unmetered bandwith plans and only one that we know of that does it for $19.99/month, of course that is pageBuzz.com.

You would never rent a retail store that you could only use for 20 hours a week, so why get a website that is only open part time.

Most people do not even realize this is happening and have no idea how many customers they have lost. Once you understand the problem, you know it is not a good way to do business and must be avoided if possible.

"The shady side of hosting"

If you have a water or electric meter at your house, you can read it and see how much you are using. You also know what your usage habits were for the month. If you were not home, you know the water bill should be $0. However, with a website you have no idea what you used. The only indicator is what your hosting provider tells you.

Unlike utilities, hosting companies are not government regulated. They do not have to answer for their actions to any regulatory board. So if they say you used more, you have to take their word for it. Companies can boost your bill even though you do not have anyone visiting your website.

The only way to get around this is to buy your own bandwith by having dedicated T-1's running to your servers or use a company like pageBuzz.com that gets no benefit from cheating you or inflating usage. Since bandwith is expensive with a T-1 between $500 and $5,000.00/month depending on location, you need to find a hosting company you can trust.

The web hosting business has become so deceptive that website hosting is at the top of the FTC's scam list.

Companies charging advance hosting fees, overage charges and hidden costs maxing out their own profit and cutting yours. Many companies even trick you into contracts by offer low fees for the first 3 months then boosting charges to 3 or 4 times the initial cost.

You can always be sure that deception will occur when the companies have no fear of being caught. With little ability to monitor this activity the Internet is like the old wild west with everyone fending for themselves.

One recent lawsuit implicates Yahoo and Match.com in defrauding members of their dating systems by paying employees to show interest in them and even go on dates with them. If they will go to that level of deception how can you trust them with something easy like bandwith?

In some cases, people are just beating themselves by buying low bandwith hosting plans to save money. In other instances, the hosting company could be padding profits. In either case, the website owner is losing big.

Unlimited Bandwith Plans

Some companies offer unlimited bandwith plans which can actually cause more problems than exceeding bandwith useage. In many cases the servers cannot handle the throughput and become unavilable due to a lack of system resources. This occurs because they sell more bandwidth than they can actually deliver.

In either case the result is a website which is not available to visitors which is a recipe for failure especially when the website owner is unaware that the website is not functional.