Originally Posted by c130 The bandwidth may not be metered but the speed of the data transfer is likely to be much lower than regular metered bandwidth sites. So your visitors will be able to download as much as they like as long as they don't mind waiting about much longer for it to come.

I'm not sure how you can equate unmetered bandwidth with a slow connection. Unless your argument is that an unmetered host is one who runs their server off the DSL in their mamma's basement, I don't think it is a fair analysis.

We offer unmetered bandwidth on plans priced at $20 and up. We don't feel that it is seriously that big of deal at that price point. Six or seven $20 accounts would about pay for the server for a month. And I doubt that most web sites could use 95 GB of bandwidth or more in a month (based on a 500 GB server limit).

It is a gamble that you take as a web host, and if you get burnt, you will likely rethink the policy. The gamble will usually pay off, especially in the case I outlined above. I know many sites on dedicated servers "only" use fifty GB of bandwidth a month. The reason they decided to go dedicated was so they wouldn't have to deal with any other web sites in the event of huge traffic spikes (say 1000 concurrent visitors). Which is another part of the "unlimited"/unmetered gamble. For dynamic sites like message boards, the bandwidth may not burn as quickly as CPU cycles.

The way to be profitable is to utilize servers to the point where, well, they are profitable. But you also need to keep an eye on loads and other resource usages before you can conclude that there is a problem with any given buisness model.

I hope I haven't rambled too far, I have a tendency to do that unfortunately.
-- HW