Web hosting services often state that they offer “scalable bandwidth”. Does anyone know what that actually means? It seems to be one of those terms that’s supposed to make you feel good but not actually mean anything in particular. What does it even mean to have a specific bandwidth allocation? Will your site suddenly stop getting served if the bandwidth transfer limit has been reached? And does “scalable bandwidth” mean that your site will still be served up even if you go over that? And if so, why? Will it typically be at a cost? Will you be pinged the next day with a request/demand to upgrade?
Unfortunately, hosting sites don’t seem to explain this—which seems like a bad sign to me … that I may not want to hear the answer.
Well as far as I have noticed it has to do with webhostings who normally don’t have “unlimited” bandwidth.
Basically in the terms of condition they can state somewhere that you are allowed to go 3 or 4 times over the normall amount of their avarage user.
In that sense it is scallable till a certain point.
<slightly off-topic>
Your post reminded me that my hosting account has a CPU limit and I’ve often wondered what would happen if I went over the limit. So I asked and this was their reply:
"Actually if your account starts using more than the allowed CPU quota your sites will start loading slower because of the server CPU overload. We have no policy to issue extra fees as penalty.
“We are tolerable and give you plenty of heads up so you can take the necessary steps to correct any abuse of your account`s resources.”
</slightly off-topic>
The physical hardware – servers have a limit to the amount of traffic they can handle. In order to accommodate more traffic the load be must distributed between multiple servers. A scalable infrastructure is one which facilities this process in a seamless manor. Shared hosting providers will do this without anyone knowing – it will all be hidden in the background. Cloud vendors typically leave it up to end-users to implement scaling and charge per node (server). The process of scaling in the simplest of forms is cloning an existing server/node and distributing the traffic through load balancing. Auto-scaling is one step further where new nodes are spun-up based on dynamic information like real-time traffic metrics.
Thanks for the replies, guys. I guess it depends on each host, and I’d have to ask them individually, but I just wondered if there’s a common language that has a common meaning (like realestate agents calling a dwelling “cosy”—which we all know to mean “poky”.)
I guess I just don’t understand why a hosting account specifies a certain bandwidth allocation while saying that you can have more bandwidth if you hit the front page of Reddit etc. I presumed there was a catch of some kind.
Ah, it just dawned on me what @oddz is saying. It doesn’t mean you get extra bandwidth, but rather that you get better access to your allocated bandwidth, because your hosting is handled by a network of machines that can spread the load if you suddenly get hit with traffic.
I use a FCHS (Free Cloud Hosting Service) and assume that not only are most of my web-pages stored on the FCHS (which they kindly make available worldwide) they also dramatically reduce the bandwidth of my server host provider because URLs to my site are directed to the FCHS. Only some pages are not and I think they are the AmpProject pages - which I still don’t fully understand
I just checked the FCHS and in the last 24 hours:
Bandwidth 157.57 MB saved
Bandwidth: 293.30 MB total
The meaning of scalable bandwidth is once the allocated bandwidth to your account is used in that case more bandwidth will be assigned to your account by taking extra charges for that.
Lets suppose you have a vps hosting width configuration
disk space: 40GB
bandwidth allocated per month(data transfer): 2TB
Ram: 2GB
Uplink Speed: 100Mbps
scalable bandwidth: 1TB/ 20$
Now meaning of this scalable bandwidth is : once you used 2TB less then a month in that case more 1TB will be assigned to your account by taking extra money 20$ per 1TB.
and that’s called the scalablity charges.
So if a hosting provider told you that they have scalable bandwidth in that you can ask them the charges of bandwidth scaliablity.
