Ask HN: How is Wix able to promise unlimited bandwidth?

3 points

6 years ago

A number of website builder (or web hosting) companies advertise unlimited bandwidth, possibly along with unlimited storage. Most of them have fine print in their T&C which cap these "unlimited" bandwidth/storage offers using some other technique. For example:

- BlueHost: https://www.bluehost.com/unlimited-hosting & https://my.bluehost.com/hosting/help/2274

- DreamHost: https://www.dreamhost.com/legal/acceptable-use-policy/

- Squarespace - https://www.squarespace.com/acceptable-use-policy/

- Vercel - https://vercel.com/docs/v2/platform/fair-use-policy

I can understand unlimited storage (with prohibition for things like file sharing, image hosting, etc), because storage nowadays is very cheap. However, that is not the case with bandwidth, especially when you're using 3rd party CDNs.

Wix seems to be using a mixture of Fastly and Cloudfront, but doesn't seem to put any rider/fine-print on bandwidth usage. Consider their support page on storage and bandwidth: https://support.wix.com/en/article/about-storage-and-bandwidth

How are they able to deliver on this promise? Isn't this a liability sitting on their balance sheet? Or, if you cross some unspecified bandwidth threshold, do they terminate your account using some other generic clause in their legal T&C? Has anyone faced this first-hand?