Why Unlimited Hosting is a Hoax

By its definition, unlimited hosting promises unlimited disk storage, bandwidth, and an infinite access to computing resources. Many of these plans are available for less than $5 a month. There is a great allure to this. Before you sign a contract promising all these for your website, however, it is important to understand what it all means.

Read The Fine Print

Sometimes, hosting companies leave much information in their terms of service documents. While the company might promise unlimited storage and bandwidth on its promotional pages, there will still be some restrictions on what you can do with all the web resources at your disposal. A popular caveat is that the “company reserves the right to limit processor time, bandwidth, processes, or memory, in cases where it is necessary to prevent negatively affecting other users.” Others go to the extent of limiting the number of tables in a database or the number of inodes and files the user can save on disk. Make sure you understand the implications of these on your website before subscribing.

Resources Are Finite

Hardware has limits to the number of processes they can handle. There is a physical limit on how much memory, disk space and CPUs a server can have. In many cases, memory and disk space can be upgraded, but even that has its limits. All servers have a maximum amount of memory and number of hard drives they can support. In effect, it is nigh impossible to create real unlimited hosting based on resources that are by nature limited.

Doing the Math

It costs several hundreds of dollars per month to create and maintain a hosting server. It is not economically prudent to allow one user to use it all up for less than $5 per month. And no hosting company would be able to offer this and continue to be in business. Unlimited hosting is unreal. The numbers don’t support it.

The majority of these offers are aimed at users whose websites require very basic infrastructure. A blog or a simple website with low traffic would not require much bandwidth or processing time to function at its peak. Most small websites use far less than 1GB of storage, for example. The main pain comes in the more sophisticated computing restrictions in inodes and databases etc. And this kicks in when websites have average sophistication. When a website’s computing needs exceed the minimum threshold allowed for any given resource, service restrictions occur.

Shared hosting, by it’s nature, is built for very small needs. Instead of forking out hundreds of dollars per month only to use say 1% of the computing resources available, small website owners can co-tenant and share the computing resources as well as the costs. But the numbers must add up. If 50 users share a $500 server, each user will pay $10 per month. To pay $5 per user, more tenants are needed on the server to cover the costs. This is what gives rise to overselling. Unfortunately or not, cheap unlimited hosting providers end up overselling their services so that the numbers can add up.

Note that in a shared hosting platform, every user shares a finite amount of resources. If majority have a basic website, there might seem to be no limit to what you can do or on how many files you can share on your website, until something changes. If one user goes beyond a threshold, it affects the functionality of all other users on the server. Thresholds are important mechanisms for server management in the shared hosting environment. The lower the service charge, the lower the thresholds are. Don’t forget, the numbers must add up.

What Should You Do?

In choosing a hosting company, it is important to understand the needs of your business. If your website will not require a lot of traffic, then you might not actually need an unlimited amount of bandwidth. For an e-commerce website, though, speed is important, and so you should understand the true CPU and I/O restrictions in your hosting plan.

Also, secure and reliable servers are necessary for your business. It is better to concentrate on your real needs to get adequate resources to cover them, instead of pursuing unlimited access to resources. Make sure you vet the hosting company to know if its customer service is good enough. After all, what good is unlimited hosting if you can’t get a hold of support staff to address your email problem.