Beware the promise of unlimited bandwidth! The hawkers promising unlimited bandwidth seem to have dwindled, especially in the dedicated server arena; a quick Google search revealed fewer providers promising unlimited bandwidth for dedicated servers at outrageously cheap prices. They more often come now not promising unlimited bandwidth but absurdly high bandwidth- intimations of 5000GB+ bandwidth for pennies(Well, not pennies, but you get the idea)! While it is true that bandwidth pricing has gone down in recent years, it’s still not a bargain basement commodity. Most of the money you pay for a dedicated server, in fact, goes to bandwidth- a quick look at Gigenet’s price breakdown, for example, reveals that most of your money goes to bandwidth. Each 1000GB of bandwidth is 100$ pricier, with unmetered 100Mbps weighing in at a hefty 1000$ per month!
Which brings us to a second point- Gigenet’s unmetered 10Mbps connection is only 100$ more a month. You’re only getting roughly 1.25 megabytes a second. If you’re hosting anything more than a small HTML-based website, individual pages can be as large as 80-100KB once all the bells and whistles of images and flash are introduced. If you’ve only got 1.25 megabytes a second, that translated to only about 12 connections at a time before the page begins to slow down. Realistically, you could probably do twice that without anyone complaining, perhaps even three times that; people are used to pages loading slower. You can see, however, that if your site grows beyond moderate popularity that that option won’t cut it!
Beware, then, of promises of unbelievably high bandwidth. Gigenet can’t afford to give you tons of bandwidth for cheap; it’s why they make you pay for it. The other providers can’t give you tons of bandwidth either, so beware when something’s too good to be true- it most likely is!