We often come across hosting companies offering unlimited web hosting and find it quite tempting to signup for an unlimited hosting account. Don’t we? But have you ever given it a thought if these kind of offers will really stand up to the expectations and offer unlimited hosting resources or if they are just using the word unlimited to their advantage?
Here are some of the most common hosting resources promised by various hosting companies along with a hosting account.
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- Unlimited Web Space
- Unlimited number of email accounts
- Unlimited number of domains
Most of us end up signing up with a hosting company just because they are offering unlimited bandwidth while in reality we don’t need it. You should know that on an average most websites having very high visitor traffic require anywhere between 30-100GB of monthly traffic and paying lot of money for a hosting account that offers unlimited bandwidth may not really make any sense in reality. But how is that a hosting company can offer unlimited resources? Let’s quickly run through some points for our understanding:
- Averaged Utilization – Hosting companies often have dedicated servers hosted in data centers with a direct 10Mbps (Mega Bits) LAN connection attached to it. Theoretically, 10 Mega Bits per second of data transfer, if you really consume that much, would actually be 108000 Mega Bytes (MB) [~105GB] a day. So, if you are looking for more bandwidth throughput than that, it may not be possible at all. Since most of us will not consume that kind of bandwidth in a single day, hosting companies can average out the bandwidth utilization and share it with other servers and clients as well. So, you still have your unlimited bandwidth offer but which is not utilized entirely.
- Oversold Web Space – It’s one of the important factors that helps hosting companies make money and stay in profits. How? – Say a server has 250GB of available free disk space and hosting company is selling 5GB of web space with each account. That makes 50 such accounts each with 5GB of web space limit. Even if all 50 accounts were to be sold, every hosting account may not use the whole 5GB of given space. Isn’t it? That’s when overselling comes into picture. Let’s assume that each hosting account on an average is using 2GB of space, that leaves us with 150GB [250GB - (2GB x 50 accounts)] of free space on hard disk. Now we can offer another 30 hosting accounts each with 5GB of space. You can oversell it further till you reach the physical storage capacity and that’s how unlimited storage is also offered.
- Hidden Terms & Conditions – If you were to pay attention to the policies of a hosting company offering unlimited resources, you will be surprised to notice many terms and conditions under which you are offered an unlimited hosting account. Some of these terms & conditions are – You may not upload pictures, multimedia files, compressed files but use the space to only upload site related static HTML pages and associated graphics. For example, if your site has 50,000 pages, each of size 100KB, it would require ~4.8GB of space to store those many pages. Now consider the point above about oversold web space, you will understand what we are talking about here.
Some points to consider before you sign up for an unlimited hosting account
- Make sure you read the Terms & Conditions and User Acceptance policy of the provider, if any.
- When in doubt, contact the hosting provider’s support and clarify the space usage constraints.
- Tell them in advance about your heavy usage of space and bandwidth to avoid any conflicts in future.
Suggestions? Something to share with our readers? Comments? Please post your comments below.
