Unlimited Hosting

Due to the highly competitive nature of the web-hosting industry some providers are offering plans that do not include any limits on the amount of bandwidth or disk space a website can use. While it may at first be tempting to use a host that offers unlimited hosting you should stop to ask yourself one important question:

When was the last time a company offered you a product or service with no limits?

It may be true that the hosting provider is offering unlimited hosting but what will also be true is that they will have very specific rules in their Terms of Service that state what you can and cannot do with your hosting space. The dirty secret of unlimited hosting is that you will not be permitted to host something that will consume a vast amount of bandwidth or disk space.

Another way to a provider will offer unlimited hosting is by limiting the amount of bandwidth you can use at any one given time. If a company offered you a rental car and told you there was no limit on the number of miles you could drive it, you might think that was a good deal, until you found out that the car would automatically shut off if you ever drove faster than 30 miles an hour.

You should always remember that no matter what a company may advertise about unlimited hosting there is always some kind of limit somewhere that protects that company. Bandwidth is not free and even the worlds largest collection of hard drives has a limited amount of space.

It is important to note however that there are aspects of hosting that can be unlimited. A hosting provider may offer you unlimited sub-domains, e-mail accounts, and certain types of databases but even this comes with a limit of some sort. As an example you can have unlimited sub-domains but the amount of transfer and disk space for the account remains the same. A hosting provider that offers unlimited numbers of e-mail accounts will likely qualify that with the stipulation that you can only send a certain number of e-mails in a given amount of time and that the e-mail stored on all of your accounts may not exceed a certain amount of disk space.

There is no such thing as truly unlimited hosting because technology simply does not allow for this and even if it did somebody would still have to pay for the bandwidth. Many people are not aware of it but anytime you transfer data from another computer across the internet it is costing somebody some money somewhere. In a web-hosting environment your hosting provider is paying for the total amount of data transfer used and then charging you for it in the form of monthly subscription fees.

The entire reason there is any sort of limit at all on a hosting account is because the hosting provider is paying for equipment, data transfer, and staff to maintain the equipment. Hosting is frequently offered with disk and transfer limits that greatly exceed the needs of the vast majority of users but they still maintain these limits in order to protect themselves from huge data transfer bills.

A hosting company that is offering unlimited transfer is not being completely honest with you and if their Terms of Service do not clearly spell out what is acceptable use of service then you should be very cautious when dealing wth them. Customers who use too much bandwidth on what is suppose to be an unlimited hosting account may find themselves suspended or banned outright from using the service. Do not accept at face value that any company can ever offer you a product or service with no limits because no product or service in the world can really make that claim.

A Better Alternative to Unlimited Hosting: 3Essentials