Keeping the Promise of Unlimited Data Transfer
Is unlimited anything actually achievable? It is quite a normal question for a customer to ask, regardless whether the product in question is data transfer on the cloud, or the all-you-can-eat buffet at the local restaurant. Can an unlimited deal really be that good?
In the case of cloud hosting it appears it can, and according to Karl Mendez, Managing Director of UK-based CWCS Managed Hosting, when customers choose wisely, they can indeed enjoy service on an unlimited scale.
That is why CWCS Managed Hosting has recently announced that it would become one of the few UK-based cloud providers to offer unlimited data transfer. Recognizing the growing need for more and more space for information flow, Mendez and his team launched a program that would provide service that would keep pace.
“The three key factors in satisfactory data transfer and cloud services are strength, reliability, and cost,” says Mendez. “Strength refers to the capacity to actually send the data through the pipes to where it needs to go. You could officially call this bandwidth. But complementary to that,” he adds, “are the issues of cost – especially the hidden costs that certain providers levy when there is a spike in demand, such as when a customer’s website traffic increases. We have eliminated that. There is also reliability, in that a provider must be up and stay up to ensure that customers are able to communicate with their own customers, even when there is great demand on the system.
In describing this latter scenario, Mendez is referring to a problem called distributed downtime, in which a cloud services company’s subscribers may unwittingly or unwillingly share a temporary downgrade in throughput in order to load-balance the requirements of another customer. This, Mendez says, is very common among cloud providers, who seem to offer unlimited services, but who themselves are limited by the size of their own pipe. “You really have to read the fine print of your contract,” he says.
Mendez continues, “At CWCS we can offer unlimited bandwidth because we run, manage and operate our own data centres. We’ve set up our own cloud infrastructure and we’ve invested significant amounts in our resources. We use high specification equipment and servers and we have deliberately built in a high amount of spare capacity. In addition, unlike some other hosting companies, we never oversell (which means we never offer capacity that we don’t actually have). So basically we can offer unlimited data transfer without affecting performance”.
The demand for more ubiquitous and robust cloud services grows daily. Numerous recent developments highlight the growing need for data throughput on a large scale; an example: the adoption of high volume Wi-Fi in public spaces such as subways, airports, planes and trains that allows passengers to not merely check their email, but to watch their own movies as they travel.
Many companies will of course, jump onto the unlimited bandwagon, but Mendez warns, they are not all able to deliver as promised, or in the configurations that match a customer’s existing structure. The strategy employed by CWCS Managed Hosting is to offer unlimited data transfer through its own recommended cloud server plans, but as well as through any cloud servers that clients have configured themselves and ordered online using CWCS’s cloud server configuration tool.
Mendez points out that to protect its customers from the types of failure or abuse they might encounter elsewhere, CWCS Managed Hosting incorporates fair and acceptable usage policies so activities such as spamming, illegal file sharing, disproportionate or excessive use of resources.
Unlimited data will become as in-demand in a few short months or years, as high-speed Wi-Fi is currently, says Mendez.
He recommends that any company looking to purchase this service to better serve their customers take the time to work through the details carefully to make sure they – and their cloud provider – can deliver as promised.
By Steve Prentice
Post Sponsored By CWCS Managed Hosting
