The Truth about unlimited Web Hosting Space and Unlimited Bandwidth

I see some people rush to this hosting plans, especially when they have unlimited add-on domain names, without really knowing what they are getting into. Most Webmasters buy an unlimited hosting space and share the hosting among their clients, but later land into trouble after some time.

Is there really anything like unlimited Web Hosting Space and Unlimited Bandwidth, the simple and straight answer is NO.

It is just like you saying you have unlimited Hard Disk on your Computer, so you can download the whole movies in this world into the hard disk, and it will never finish. If the Hosting Space being offered by this company is unlimited for little amount, Big websites like Nairaland.com, vanguardngr.com, guardianngr.com, etc would not be using a dedicated server with Huge Disk Space.

So why do Hosting Companies offer unlimited Hosting Space and Unlimited Bandwidth.

Web Hosting is a commodity. The main elements of any web hosting plan are disk space and bandwidth. Disk space is the space you have allotted on the web server to store your website. Bandwidth is an amount you have available to transfer web pages from the web server to the browsers of visitors to your site. Web pages and graphics consume bandwidth or capacity on the web. Bandwidth and disk space cost money.

Many hosting companies claim to offer "unlimited" plans (both disk space and bandwidth), but be aware that there are physical limitations to both disk space and bandwidth.

Most websites only consume a very small amount of bandwidth and disk space. Web hosting companies that provide unlimited anything as a plan feature are banking on the fact that you won't use very much. Unlimited is a marketing trick to get your business. Check in the hosting company's Terms of Service: there will probably be a note about what "unlimited" really means.

Most small, new websites will use a tiny fraction of the disk space offered. In most cases, less than 1/1000th of the limits they are offering you. This is even true for hosting companies that offer a couple gigabytes of storage space for your site. We have rarely seen a site that has exceeded limits here. Traffic on most small, new sites also tends to be low relatively speaking. Of course, there are lots of exceptions to this rule. Hosting companies are playing a game of averages here, knowing that on average, most people will use very little resources.

Like your home computer, hard drives are used at hosting companies to store your website. Hard drives are very large now, and probably much like your home computer; you really won't use that much space for your website (unless you are a power user). Websites haven't gotten that much bigger over the years, but hard drives have, driving down the cost for hosting companies. The same is true for bandwidth (a.k.a. transfer). It has gotten cheaper, and most websites really don't need that much. It's cheap for the hosting company.

You will run Out of CPU and Memory Long before You Run out of Disk space or Transfer (if you are using it properly)

Your website is hosted on a server, which is just very much like your home computer (but usually in a different shape, and more specialized for hosting purposes). There are usually dozens, or hundreds of websites hosting on each server.

A big host like Bluehost defines their server limits as a number of CPU seconds used which are equated to real-time seconds; if a website has 200 processes in a minute and each uses .4 CPU seconds, your website would be suspended. If those processes took two minutes, then the website would remain running. Most web hosts try to avoid explaining the technical side of this, and instead try to sell to customers based on how many domains can be hosted with one account, and how much space a website is allocated.

For Hostgator they are measuring the web hosting usage by another means. Interesting enough Inodes (Index Nodes) is introduced. Whenever a file is created or uploaded into the hosting account, one Inodes is consumed. Inodes contents the admin information of a file. A total of 250,000 Inodes are allocated for one shared hosting account. Thus Hostgator is sort of monitoring the usage by Inodes. For subscribers, there is a clear Inodes indicator at the left hand side sidebar inside the cPanel where you can see your usage.

Does it mean 250,000 Inodes are the limit of the storage? Only 250,000 files can be created? The answer is yes. Any exceed of this amount may result in account suspension. So perhaps the unlimited storage by Hostgator means a subscriber can store files with as huge as possible file size however it is kind of limited to 250,000 files in an account.

However I think that is fair because Hostgator and Bluehost have spoken the truth beforehand.

But not all hosting Companies that offer unlimited Hosting and bandwidth will inform you of this, but may actually place restrictions on the Hosting Packages

In short, if your site starts to get a lot of traffic at once and slow down your website, it's going to hog up that servers processor (CPU); which in turn will make everyone else’s website on that server go slow too.

The same is true for memory (RAM) usage. Some hosts even give you a short history of your site's CPU and memory usage.

Dynamic, database-driven sites, such as ones that have PHP, ASP, Perl, Python, and other coding languages, will definitely take up more server resources (e.g. CPU and memory) than a static site--one written in HTML. This is even more so when your site has poorly coded scripts, and fails to use caching, which can be accomplished numerous ways.

Almost all web hosts that provide unlimited space and bandwidth will have in their terms of service many restrictions that most customers simply bypass without paying any attention to. These restrictions usually include all types of websites that use up a large amount of space such as the following:

Backup websites

Warez or Illegal Content websites

Streaming videos or music

Downloading software, movies, music etc websites

Sites that offer free resources to the public

Lastly, when it comes to unlimited bandwidth you have to be careful about that as well. “Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that website visitors can download from a website (source).” Most unlimited bandwidth provides will claim they have unmetered bandwidth which can be true, but, the tricky part is, if your website consumes too many CPU resources your account will be suspended.

Most host give your individual web hosting account a 10% CPU resource limit, but if you go over that limit your account will be suspended. As you know, you are sharing the server you are placed on with other individuals just like you. If one person uses too many CPU resources or creates a high server load at any given time, that effects your website as well, which causes downtime or slow response time to your website. Many web host that provide unlimited bandwidth will eventually face this horrible factor.

How much room do you actually need for a site? Looking through my server logs most people use 500MB (megabytes) of disk space and about 5GB (gigabytes) of bandwidth. That is plenty of room for the average person with only 1GB of disk space. But most people will not ever look at how much bandwidth space they are using. They only look at storage space when they are looking for a host. The hosting market these days are very competitive. Web Hosts bank on your lack of knowledge and promise you TB (terabytes) of space and bandwidth. If you look at burst.net they have a terabyte hard drive for $400.00 a month per host. So think for a minute, how can a host offer you a $1.95 month web hosting plan for a terabyte of space? Mathematically they cannot possibly do it, and yet, they know about it and lie to your face that they can. They also hide behind their TOS (terms of service) saying you must have active sites etc. Do you think Google.com would pay for 1,000′s of servers if they could host at DreamHost, who oversells web space, for $7.95?

The bottom line is, if you are serious about the future of your website, it is best to do your own research and actually pay for what you receive. If the offer looks too good to be true, more than likely it is.

http://sbohost.com/2011/11/17/the-truth-about-unlimited-web-hosting-space-and-unlimited-bandwidth/

Informative!! i ve hosted my domain with Thewebpole and hosted my domain, the 24/7 customer support service is good and satisfactory, there are two different OS and three different plans of that you can select the one which suits for you and there are languages like asp.net,ruby,rails etc also you can choose the type of language you use for you,

Even my site with all the traffick i am getting is using a very small bandwidth and not so much space.

Unimited hosting is a sham. It's more or less a myth. Ask yourself this question. Why do you have VPS and dedicated hosting when there's unlimited hosting.

Now how come this long post didn't get flagged by the NL spam bot?

On a serious note, having lived in America for a while, I can tell you authoritatively that nothing is "free" and nothing is "unlimited" and you don't "save" money.

Very informative post. Please keep it up and keep them coming. . .

yawa-ti-de:

Now how come this long post didn't get flagged by the NL spam bot?

On a serious note, having lived in America for a while, I can tell you authoritatively that nothing is "free" and nothing is "unlimited" and you don't "save" money.

Very informative post. Please keep it up and keep them coming. . .

@yewatide, it was flagged, and i got banned for 1 week, am even surprised that it still got posted, maybe the moderator read through it, and approved it.

Anyway we need to inform webmasters, because most webmasters buy shared hosting of unlimited space, and host a lot of clients sites on it, but the problem is that they only get one cpanel to manage the account, so in the future if the client wants to transfer his website to another webmaster for management, the said webmaster will find it difficult to release the cpanel details, because it will give access to all his accounts that he his managing.

Nice one. I challenged someone on this issue sometime back at this link : https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-579852.0.html#msg8356209