Unlimited Web Hosting - Got Dirt? The Truth on Unlimited Web Space and Bandwidth

By Daniel Brock

Anyone who has ever thought about starting a website eventually figures out that they need a home for their websites to live on. During the search for a web hosting provider, almost everyone is lured into an unlimited web hosting plan at one point or another. After all, what could be better than having a web hosting plan where you don't ever have to worry about running out of hard drive space and bandwidth?

Eventually he/she will find out that companies offering unlimited disk space and bandwidth are just using this term as a marketing scheme to lure in unsuspecting customers. At first, the new user will love all the freedom that comes with the plan. While your website is small you will be fine with the unlimited plan. However, as time goes on and your website becomes more popular is when the problems will start to occur. The first thing that will happen when you start using anything real amounts of resource, is that your web host will suspend your website.

They will almost always pull this little terms of service clause - 'If a customer's site is found to be monopolizing a servers resources, we may suspend the account for abusing the server.' - In this case, suspension means they are giving you the boot, not just suspending you temporarily.

So as long as I don't use too much of the servers CPU or RAM resource, my website will be fine, right? WRONG. As soon as you start using too much disk space or bandwidth, they can simply say that you are monopolizing. After all, there is no way for the end user to tell how much their site is taxing the web server.

The truth is, there is no way to offer unlimited amounts of a physical resource. It is impossible to do. That is why unlimited web hosting providers are so dirty. When is the last time you went into BestBuy and picked up a hard drive with Unlimited amounts of GBs? Never! They don't exist! So how is it possible that a host can honestly offer a client unlimited disk space - they can't. The idea is to advertise unlimited, suck in as many customers, and boot all the ones that use anywhere near a reasonable amount of space/bandwidth. The goal is to fill a server up with as many small, low usage websites as possible. And because there are far more smaller websites than larger, the host can keep enough clients to keep the business profitable.

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