Is unlimited disk space and bandwidth a lie?

It would be interesting to see what a religious forum would say about this subject. Note, supporters of the policy say it's like an "All you can eat" buffet and not a crime.

 

I do not think so, indeed some servers are equiped with 1gbit/s connectivity and it will not happen that the connection will be interupted. So they will not limit you the way that they will disallow you to download/upload more data.
Some people use word bandwidth for data transfer and vice versa. if we are talking about width of the connection (megabytes per second), then usually it is limited, but some people provide clouds which can be quite flexible regarding data transfers.

 

yes... and no...
The truth is that there are limits. If unlimited was real, noone would ever need dedicated servers. Apple would never need to build a datacenter either, if they could simply signup for an unlimited host at $2.95 a month....
The hosts TOS, is written in a way that means they can kick off "abusers" who believe that unlimited is unlimited.

"Unlimited" for all intents and purposes is simply a marketing tactic to increase sales as a majority of people honestly do not know how much HDD or Bandwidth they need. Think about apples branding. Apple was promoting on their mp3 players that it could hold "1000 songs" while other brands promoted GB space , even if it had double the storage capacity were losing sales as people did not really understand their own needs in technical terms.

Here is a few facts to consider:
- some buyers think if they have a limit, that they have to pay "excess usage fees". In actual fact, their website is just turned off for the remainder of the billing month, which is a good thing / bad thing depending on your point of view.
- In one instance, a company that I was buying told me that they booted anyone that used up more then 1gb space, and 1gb bandwidth, even though he sold unlimited... This is clearly a scam, and happens all the time. Alot of dodgy hosts, will have "secret" limits, and boot anyone that hits that secret limit. I would rather have a fixed limit, then unlimited.
- One person (story from webhostingtalk.com) had all of their websites on a single account. IF there had been a limit, he could have had different websites on different cpanel accounts. The host had a major issue, and he woke up, all his sites were gone. It turns out that as his account was over a certain size he was removed from the hosts backup routine. He was living under the promise that his host would handle all backups for him, and when he learnt the hard way, he lost everything. He earnt his entire livelihood from his websites. I have seen hosts that do have this in their TOS, that you are not backed up if your account is over xxgb. However, when you are signing up, you look at "unlimited" and "daily backups"....
- one host I wanted to buy did have unlimited bandwidth, but it was a 1mb unmetered! WTF! and with the number of sites crammed onto the server, at the price he charged for unlimited, I decided not to touch it.
- Over the years, I have only hosted a few thousands websites. Only one website that I can remember using over 50gb bandwidth, and that outgrew shared hosting based on cpu and ram consumption rather then its bandwidth. But right now, I could offer all clients on my cpanel server, "unlimited" bandwidth, or I could offer then 10gb bandwidth, it would not affect them at all. The difference is that when I put 10gb bandwidth, you do not get sales.
I prefer to put a limit, because, I do believe that this is ethical. And secondly, there are limits in max ram, and cpu usuage.
- fun thing to do if you get bored. Go through the webhosting services listed here. There are ones where you have alpha resellers, and can resell unlimited resellers, each with unlimited accounts and unlimited everythings.... all for a few $$ per year. yet its not possible.


I am sure there are some hosts out there, with unfathomable amounts of storage and bandwidth, and with a cleverly crafted TOS, can genuinely offer you absolutely ridiculous amounts of storage and bandwidth, yet they know full well, its impossible to get close to using them.

 

all of this have fair usage limit.

 

yes of course but they add terms and condition and where they include line for fair usage and limit.

 

"Unlimited" web space, for instance, is mostly used as a marketing trick and almost always has specific limitations stated in Terms of Service or AUP. So, I strongly recommend to everyone better to go with the hosting provider who has clear definition of the resources they offer to the customers, so one can be sure about the quality of the services offered.

 

I don't really see a moral problem with the issue because common sense would say nobody could offer unlimited resources.

 

Common sense isn't that common. Which got me thinking, why is it called common sense? Lol

 

It's like mobile phone companies who offer unlimited minutes and texts. It's never the case, they do have a limit based on fair use policy

Same applies to broadband providers offering unlimited broadband

 

Nobody offers unlimited anything. It's a lie. They just gave their package a name, and the name is 'unlimited'.

It's like naming your cat 'bulldog', but it will never bark

Unlimited storage does not exist and host that generally advertise unlimited are generally more limited and have higher restrictions on your space then hosts that offer you realistic storage numbers.

 

It is recommended to signup with the hosting company, which offers packages with defined disk space, monthly bandwidth, CPU, RAM, inodes and other server resources, so you'd know what are you purchasing, while avoiding be commercially tricked

 

Unlimited space is a marketing scheme there no "unlimited" SSD or HDD on the market, company offering these offers most always have limitations on their terms of services.

Bandwidth can be "unmetered"/ unlimited so that true.

As long your providers pay the upstream you can use an unlimited amount of bandwidth but then again if you are talking about shared hosting, most company do have limitations on their terms of service.

 

It is a lie. There are no free lunches in life. In fact, Microsoft themselves were forced to withdraw their unlimited cloud drive plan after people literally took it for unlimited. They pulled the plug on unlimited after they terminated a lot of user accounts that ended up using Terabytes of storage.

The truth is that this is a marketing ploy and the web hosts that offer this do so on the basis of 2 underlying facts:

1. Not everyone uses a lot of disk space/bandwidth. In fact close to 90% of accounts don't even use 1GB of disk space and or more than 5GB of bandwidth. It is only the top 5% of accounts that uses up a lot of space and bandwidth.
2. The account by design does not allow you to use unlimited resources because other restrictions on the account like number of files, process limits, cpu and memory limitations through Cloudlinux etc actually would limit your account and warrant a VPS upgrade even before you use up 50+GB of bandwidth. So by design, it is not possible to use the so called unlimited space and bandwidth any which ways.

 

mostly they give limited resource....

 

Of course, it is. Because, there is nothing called Unlimited Hard disk in this world nor unmetered bandwidth. Bandwidth is metered by ISP's. So, it's a total lie.

 

We do offer similar packages. However, a better term for these kinds of plans is "unmetered". We do not limit you on the resources you need if you are hosted on an unmetered package.

Clients who choose to host their sites on unmetered packages still use a finite amount of resources. However, some webmasters prefer to have the freedom and not be limited as to how much they can use their plan.

 

Hostgator says : unlimited hosting is like a buffet, you can eat as many as you can, dont waste, dont throw, dont take it away .........

 

In short I would say yes. If you look at any host that offers unlimited space then go look at TOS you will see they have limits set up.

You have to think have you every seen an unlimited Hard drive in the store. The closest they could come to it is setting up a cloud network and if they gave everyone 1 TB space and customers used it that company would be out of business before you know it as it would cost them way more than what they are selling the hosting plans for.

 

You only need to look at the number of complaints against "unlimited hosts" to know there is a problem.
Unlimited is a bad term. Unrestricted is better. Still most of these hosts will place some restrictions on the account.