You might have heard many times about Unlimited Hosting space offers. Most of the foreign companies and some of the indian companies are now selling this unlimited hosting packages. Even IBEE has got some requests from our existing customers asking to introduce unlimited packages during our last Customer satisfaction survey. You might want to know the realistic scenario of this unlimited packages: 1. There is no Hard Disk available with unlimited size to sell the space, even if you buy a 1 TB hard disk, the TOS from the vendor will be pretty clearly written stating that you cannot use more than 500 GB. Some companies may cliam that they can attach a new hard disk to the server after they completly filled with the existing one and they dont answer how will one server run backups every day or week of unlimited space. In this scenario the server will be very slow if they attach another drive and run automated backups in one server. 2. You have to read the TOS and AUP before you buy any unlimited hosting package because they dont allow you to host files not related to your business or domain name. doesn’t this looks funny? And they dont allow you to use more than 10% of CPU usage per hour and like this so many restrictions. 3. Some unlimited hosting companies will even restrict the number of files hosted on your account. you need to make sure you check the TOS before you buy this service. 4. you can check the total disk space available in that server you are hosted by using this tool http://phpsysinfo.sourceforge.net/, this will give you information about server CPU, uptime, disk space and other important details. 5. some unlimited hosting companies may limit the bandwidth to restrict user to use the unlimited space, without appropriate bandwidth you can’t do anything with disk space. 6. Some companies might oversell their server space thinking that customer will not host those many domains under a reseller package and they think customer won’t be able to get that much business and host files with huge sizes. These companies servers are affected with lot of downtime and very slow in accessing the websites. Recently a web hosting company in India faced this problem and people wrote lot of bad reviews about them 7. If you buy an unlimited plan from a host, lets say if you use 5GB for a website that has 30,000 uniques a day that consumes alot of cpu I can guarantee the host will suspend you even though you have only used minimum space of unlimited plan. So unlimited hosting packages will always have restrictions. Hope i have given enough explanation about unlimited hosting and now readers might get an idea about how these unlimited hosting companies force their Marketing Gimmics to innocent customers. you need to go through their TOS and AUP before making a decision to buy unlimited hosting packages. For example, companies like Google and Amazon are not giving unlimted hosting space even though they have world’s largest data centers. Google App Engine is a hosting package which google sells but they charges on basis of several components like per hour CPU usage, disk space, bandwidth usage etc. Soruce: http://www.ibeehosting.com/blog/unlimited-hosting-space-customer-cheating.html
Yeah, that absolutely right. Unlimited is not possible in any aspect of life and there is nothing without limits. The term unlimited is only a marketing strategy used by the hosting providers to fool innocent users. One should always go through the TOS of companies offering unlimited space or bandwidth and you will find some restrictions after all nothing in the world is unlimited.
very true. If anyone needs a more mathematical formulation i can send an abstract of a paper im working on titled 'How huge companies sell what they dont have!' , which is a look of the points mentioned by soney218 but in a more mathematical fashion. Since im still waiting for it to be published in a journal i cannot post it in the open but if your really interested ill send you the important parts
True as the largest generally availiable SATA drive is 2TB. However, you're assuming that all of these hosts are working with a server with a single drive. At the "bottom" end of the scale, in terms of size, many 1U servers will take 4 drives. If they are using 2TB drives, then that gives 8TB of RAID0 space, 6TB of RAID5 space, and 4TB of RAID10 space. It would take someone with a 1mbps ADSL line about 40 months, uploading 24 hours per day, to fill a server with 6TB of disk space. Many of the larger hosts operate SANS with multiple drives. We operate some SANS with 24No 1TB (could be 2TB if we wanted) in 3U of space and due to the way these work, we could have multiple units working as a single SAN resource. Although the disk space isn't "unlimited" it can be scaled out to effectively become unlimited or at least larger than the average user could ever hope to fill. I don't condone "unlimited" offers of space. Not because its not (almost) physically impossible but because the financial costs of providing it. No-one in their right-mind will dedicate tens of $1000s of dollars of equipment to someone spending $10 per month. Why shouldn't there be restrictions? In shared hosting, a number of different users are operating their web sites on the same server. Why should a single user be able to utilize all the resources of that server to the detriment of others? The key word here is SHARED. Some web sites are busier than others, some use more CPU than others. It's the hosts responsibility to ensure that all users have adequate resources available so all users' sites perform at a good level. If a single user needs a lot of CPU resources to run their site, then they should be looking at a VPS of dedicated server. As for hosting files not directly used by a web site, I don't see any problems with that. After all, you're purchasing a hosting plan, not an off-site storage plan. There's nothing sinister about this. We do this too, but mostly because we also backup customers sites as part of the package and we only want to be backing up the files that we need to. The more files there are to restore in an emergency, the longer it takes to restore them. That, I admit, is a strange one. Assuming that the host lets you run phpinfo. You can't rely upon this information as it only provides info directly related to the physical server you are connected to, not the actual resources available to that server such as a SAN. Absolutely true, but it's becoming more and more common for "unlimited" hosts to offer unlimited bandwidth too. In fact, unlimited bandwidth came along long before unlimited diskspace ever did. Bandwidth is one area where there are definitely limits. An "unlimited" host could restrict switch port speeds to 10mbps (allowing around 3300GB of transfer at full utilisation). They could then restrict the backbone to 10mbps too, so you could have a 24-port switch, with every server on a 10mbps port, but the total capacity of the switch would be 10mbps due to the network backbone - a great way to offer "unmetered" ports, yet restrict the total bandwidth available to small amount. If they are using managed switches (and most will) then they will also be able to run QoS where traffic can be prioritized. You can bet the "unmetered" or "unlimited" servers are connecting via low-speed ports with the lowest priority available. Don't forget, the host can say they have a 1gbps network - because they have - but they are only operating it at 10mbps in certain areas. NIC's can be aggregated, multiple trunks can run between switches and routers, but ultimately there is a limit, or bottleneck, somewhere. It can happen, but many well managed companies operating this system also operate it extremely well. It comes down to the resources the hosting company has available and how it is using them. These types of problems tend to affect small hosts with one or two servers who simply don't have the capacity to deal with this correctly. Lets face it, hardware costs money, transit costs money, management costs money, and support costs money. If you are paying $4 per month, exactly how much support time can you use before it is no longer economically viable to host you. Hosts aren't micro-managed to that level, but you really do only get what you pay for. Expensive hosting isn't always an indicator of a good company or a good experience, but cheap hosting can never be consistently excellent. I've seen very few sites that are 5GB in size. Most sites are less than 100MB. I'm not saying there aren't sites that are 5GB of larger, I'm just saying that the average site is nothing like as large as this. 30,000 uniques a day is a busy site. In fact, it's a very very very busy site. A site like this is probably making some profit or a lot of profit. Does it make economic sense to base a succesful business on a $4 (or evern $50) per month shared hosting plan? Don't be silly. Even with 30,000 uniques, it's unlikely they would visit every single page. It is feasible that a site of this size, with this many visitors, visiting every page, may have no impact of the CPU usage. This could be because the site is static and CPU usage is absolutely minimal. If it was a dynamic site (PHP, ASP.NET) then it would require some excellent programming to be viable on shared hosting. It is a point worth making again. Read the TOS carefully. It is a marketing gimmick, but there are some companies who will honour their "unlimited" diskspace option. Of course there will be some sort of restrictions, but many times these restrictions are not there to stop you using what is on offer, but to protect other users from you "abusing" resources to their detriment. Is there a correlation between, say, "CPU resource usage" and the amount of diskspace or transfer your site consumes? Yes there is, but it isn't alway linear, and it could be possible to consume the resources offered without breaking the other terms of the contract. Unfortunately, it is only a small number of hosts who will do this or have the capacity and resources to genuinely offer that. Most of the time, it simply isn't possible and you will quickly find your site restricted or closed when an unscrupulous company offers unlimited hosting ONLY because it is a marketing gimmick, not because they have a realistic chance of providing it. The hosting market is extremely competitive, and this competition has led to low-ball pricing and high-value promises. You can't really blame the consumer of these services because in most cases they are unable to make a proper value judgement. All it would take is for someone to sit-back and ask what kind of value could they provide another person if they were paid $4 or $6 per month. It might create a more realistic expectation of what is actually possible for this amount of money, but most peole don't do that. So, I haven't reached a conclusion. Unlimited space isn't necessarily a lie for the purposes of physical capacities, but theability of the customer to upload that volume of information is severely limited so the functionally can be offered with no realistic expectation of the average customers being able to use it. It certainly isn't economically viable for a single customer to use it, but when costs/income are averaged out, it might be possible for a single consumer to use 5TB of storage and for the company not to be losing money as a total operation. If every customer used that space it wouldn't be possible, but every customer wont so the argument is moot. I have more problems with "unlimited bandwidth" because I don't see how you could do that unless you stuck multiple NICs in a server. NIC's do have a maximum capacity that you can't exceed. Network backbones have maximum speeds too, and connections to the internet have maximum speeds. Fortunately for most hosts, what is offered and what is consumed are vastly different. If a datacentre has, say, 10GB capacity, that's only just over 3 Million GB of transfer at full capacity. with some hosts offering 10TB with their hosting plans, they would only be able to take on just over 310 customers before maxing-out, yet they run the whole datacentre, with thousands of servers and milliions of customers with that capacity, and site responses are fast. Most sites consume considerably less than 1Gb per month so those site that do use considerably more are able to run at full speed and not be compromized - either speed-wise or financially.
Very well said RonBrown. Well the key is not to look at it from the view of unlimited or unmetered. Look at it as a client wanting to start a business. What they are trying to say is that you can use all that you want for that sie without being bothered about anything else. The terms are to make sure the plans arent used as storage medium or for media sharing, etc The model is developed keeping in mind the "Shared Users" section and their average consumption. A little research here reveals power law plays and important role in deciding averages and the hosting companies cleverly make sure the higher end of the spectrum are removed thus lowering averages. On an average upto 2000 users are alloted one server so you can figure out the average size and bandwidth used by each.
A very well explain by RonBrown. I'm impressed that you took your time to explain the nature of Unmetered Hosting. It is rare to see hoster limit the number of file you can host. This is also depend on what kind of file is being stored. I believe if it only html or php or asp etc nobody would limit that.
This restriction may seem silly to us but there are some bigger things for the host to keep in mind. inodes are essentially names given to a sort of index that keeps track of all attributes of a file or directory. As the number of these inodes increases the resource consumption increases. Also most of hosts offer a backup and with increasing inodes the resources required for this operation also increase many folds. Easy example : store each row of a database as a file. you do it for the fun of it! you have a million rows. million files with a few bytes or kb of data each. Now the number of inodes is in million and the resources it is taking is comparable with that of the data itself!
Backup to RAID hdd (hardware raid) is quite fast unless you go for remote backup of which I think is quite fast too with rsync. Rsync only update any file that has been changed since last backup so on 1st run it may take a while to complete but then you can run it weekly without having any slow effect on the node itself. **Don't waste your time for software RAID. We have experience this before and it give us too much trouble. Better get a hardware RAID setting. Less trouble = Happy client