Why the fuzzy bandwidth limits?

If you've come to this page, it's probably because you were wondering why we were hand-waving about the bandwidth limits for PythonAnywhere accounts. You're definitely right to wonder — "Low", "Medium" and "High" are pretty vague terms.

When PythonAnywhere was still a new service, we did not know if it would be necessary to charge for bandwidth, so we added those options so we could charge for bandwidth if it became necessary. Up until now, we have not needed to, but we still want to keep that available. So a certain amount of hand-waving is impossible to avoid!

Anyway, obviously we can't leave it at that and charge you for something without at least vaguely telling you what it is, so the details of what we're promising to deliver are in the Terms and Conditions. For those who prefer a human-readable version of all that legalese, here's what we're trying to say:

  • Beginner accounts are for people who just want to try out Python and play with it a bit. We don't offer any guarantees about what bandwidth you'll get, but obviously it'll be enough to be usable.
  • Developer accounts are for people who want to use PythonAnywhere to run a normal personal or small-business website. We're not trying to compete with a $200/month Linode instance (the clue is in the price) but if you have a hosting account, your slice of our servers should be able to deal with getting linked from the front page at Hacker News. Well, unless you've totally messed up your web application and are hitting the database hundreds of times per page view :-)

So, that's it. Is there anything we're missing? Are we getting anything wrong? .