what is bad about Unlimited Web Hosting

Thank you Ron, well said and well done! You said everything I was trying to say on that last reply of yours..

WSWD, how do you like arguing with someone of your own size now? You think you're so smart, and you act as if you know more than anybody else! Think again... you just got served! big time.

I don't know why I was arguing with you, we all know we will never use "Unlimited" Space anyways... So what's the point in arguing.. ? It just means hostgator will provide you with whatever amount of space as you need as you grow.. Unless you start using too much server resouces such as cpu and memory then they will have you move to a dedicated or vps...

Chances are, you will never pass 1TB Diskspace in your websites life time. Unless your hosting some illegal files such as movies, softwarez which is highly illegal and by hostgator's terms of services that will get your account terminated without notice in no time! or running a million dollar website like facebook and ebay, and things of that nature.. and then we ask our selves "What the hell is facebook doing in a shared hosting account"

 

Thanks for the comments, but please don't get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for WSWD. We may disagree, and occassionaly come-to-blows, over "unlimited" providers (even if neither of us offer it) but I have all the time in the world for him. He is very helpful, he does talk sense [except about unlimited ], and he definitely knows his stuff. I'd put more faith in his opinions and views than those of many other people because he comes from a solid hosting background, runs a succesful company, and has proven to be very knowledgable. So please, respect where respect is due. WSWD's contribution to Digitalpoint is excellent and his opinions and the help he provides are usually spot-on.

 

Sounds fair, thanks for sharing your knowledge and I agree totally about what you talked about in your post, you said everything that I was trying to say but WSWD just wouldn't listen and he just wouldn't let go of it.., I gotta admit that I was getting a little mad and just wanted to punch my computer out.

He thinks Hostgator is just one big scam, and yet they are the #1 I don't see how's that possible. Hostgator has been around long enough if they really were a big scam people would of noticed it by now.

 

worth reading from you guys. now i have valuable info regarding this topic

 

I got served? Oh jesus. You sound just like a 10 year old kid...or a 20 year old kid with absolutely no education, who barely passed high school. Hate to generalize but it is what it is. You really should be spending more time in college and less time on these forums.

Nothing but respect for RonBrown. He knows that very well. We do just have to agree to disagree sometimes (usually on "unlimited", ha ha!). Thanks for the kind words Ron! Nothing but absolute respect for you as well.

Well, the only reason I say that can't be the limit is because I have put several terabytes on a couple of my own cPanel servers before. I know 63GB isn't any sort of technical limit on a cPanel account or such. But anytime I try to go over 63GB over there, the server crashes, and I mean uber going offline, load of 70+ crashes, and that load is after it comes back online. I don't really want to affect other clients on the server just to prove to a point, so I gave up for the day yesterday after crashing the entire server and taking it offline twice, and pegging the load over 40 for a solid two hours.

As you said, with all the SAN stuff and clusters, it's possible to offer HUGE amounts of disk space. I have had clients (2 in particular...one was a production/media company with huge HD video and image file libraries, and the second was a law firm, that transferred a crapload of legal documents) use 4 or 5 terabytes of hard drive space on their own, and draw 100mbits continuously off my servers.

The difference is that those people weren't paying $5/mo. And that's the main point I'm trying to make. As I mentioned to hostingder several times already, these "unlimited" companies aren't going to put hard drive after hard drive in servers, and provision new servers for one client paying $5. I don't care who they are or how much money they make. If they did that, why even offer things like VPS or dedicated servers? Why would I ever want to provision my own dedicated server for $400/mo. when I could just go to one of these "unlimited" companies and spend $5/mo. for them to buy me my own server with as many hard drives as I want?

So at the end of the day, they aren't going to offer any client "unlimited" amounts of data or bandwidth, and in fact, even any appreciable amount. It just doesn't make financial sense. They aren't going to lose $400 for every client who decides to host any decent amount of data.

 

Yon't don't have to insult me, I come from a well educated family. I graduated High school one year earlier with a 3.11 GPA I am currently attending Miami University in Middletown, OH taking Computer Networking courses. These unlimited companies won't buy you a server for $5/month and it's not about what you want.. You can't tell them to give you 500TB of disk space because they wont, it's about what you need and what you're using...

 

From my experince, there is no unlimited and unmetred webhosting. They have limits just focus on small details

 

That's what we are discussing, they limit you on other resources rather than on bandwidth and Disk space but these companies are smart and they don't put this right in the open, they put these regulation in their terms of services because they know that about 60-70% of members ordering shared hosting don't take their time to read through the terms of services.

 

Well then how is it unlimited if they won't even let you use 500TB of data? That sure sounds like a limit to me. How about a client like the one of mine who needs and uses 5TB of disk space and about 25TB of bandwidth each month? Do you think there is any "unlimited" company out there who will buy a several hundred dollar server for them, for $5/mo.? They hardly use CPU, they have next to no processes running, they are well under the inode limitations of any "unlimited" provider out there. I can guarantee you there's not one provider out there who is going to buy them a dedicated server, and let them pay $5 for some "unlimited" account. Not going to happen in this world or any other.

 

What's your name? I feel weird calling you wswd. My name is Richard. And I said that hostgator won't dedicate 500GB of disk space just for you because you're in a shared hosting account. If your site makes it to 100TB of data using a shared account, I am positive that hostgator would have no trouble supplying you this amount of disk space. But understand this, it is most likely that your site would end up with a dedicated server by the time you reach 1TB of disk usage, because it's not just Disk space that your website is consuming.. You gotta put in consideration all the other server resources being consumed too and hostgator has regulations on this.. I migrated an account from hostgator last week to my servers, the guy gets 16K visits per day and his site was consuming so much cpu and memory that hostgator kept constantly blocking access to his site. He was only using 2Gb of disk space. but his website was taking 25% of hostgator's server resources and his site was being blocked constantly, and believe it or not his site is not taking much of my resources, I installed LiteSpeed on the server that he's in and now his website is loading faster than when it was with hostgator. the server that his website is in the load is at 0.08 memory usage at 1.65GB of 4.5GB. LiteSpeed helps out a lot, if I unistall LiteSpeed the load goes up to around 0.45 and memory usage goes to 1.88GB out of 4.5GB

So, chances are you will end up with a dedicated server by the time you reach 20-30k Visitors per day regardless of how much disk space you're using. WSWD, My apologies goes up to you and I am sorry that we got off on the wrong foot. You seem like a pretty well liked person, and very knowledgeable. Seems like nothing we say will change the way you think, and nothing you say will convince me otherwise.. I am sorry I bad mouth you, and I am sorry we got off on the wrong foot, I admire you for your knowledge and your success in the business.

Best of luck to you,

 

Well, maybe you HAVE hit a physical diskspace limit with the server, but you'll definitely be in violation of their other terms being responsible for a load like that on the server. I'm surprised they haven't closed your account. Gotta admit though that I thought they could have done better than 63GB before causing such problems on their server. It's not as if 63GB is THAT much.

That's a point where we can agree. 4-5TB of data is the exception - a very rare exception - but when you think about it, it's only a couple of SATA drive's worth given the size of modern drives. Just a few years ago you couldn't realistically contemplate storing 4-5TB of data unless you were spending megabucks. Now such data volumes can be had for a couple of hundred bucks.

That's probably true, but only if you look at individual servers rather than storage area networks. We're just starting to move down that route, with redundant storage servers containing massive arrays of disks. It doesn't cost much to put together a 40TB array, and if you see the server in a previous link, a 150TB array is perfectly possible (in 4U's too...wow!).

Using redundant arrays, while expensive, can end up being cheaper because the actual web servers can be smaller (physically) with just an OS running on RAID1 SSD drives, oodles of RAM, and a couple of decent 6-core Xeons. In fact, for shared hosting, this type of set-up is ideal. Supermicro even have a server where there's 2 motherboards, each with dual CPU's in a single 1U piece of hardware...so performance per U of rackspace is becoming denser all the time.

With a 150TB array, I don't think I'd be bothered if a single hosting customer was using 4-5TB diskspace because it wouldn't impact greatly on the overall diskspace available. In pure percentage terms it might be quite high, but given the number of customers using the array it would be more than compensated for and their actual cost is not an issue. But - this is the important point - how many sites are realistically ever going to get to that size? It's all just smoke and mirrors, theory, and moot because 99.99% (made up figure!) of sites are never going to use more than a couple of hundred MB of diskspace.

Now we're getting practical. Just because all this diskspace is possible to provide that's only part of the equation - and a very minor part of it too. There's performance to think about, and when it comes to shared hosting there are CPU and RAM limits (sometimes disk I/O and bandwidth percentage limits too). All hosts have these restrictions - not just the unlimited hosts - and these are the ultimate determinants of what type of hosting is best.

It might be great having 15TB of data stored on a server, but when there are limits to how much of this is accessible to X number of concurrent users because of the CPU and RAM limits then shared hosting may not be practical for a busy site. These restrictions don't impact on the ability to use the diskspace up, but they do impact on how much performance you can glean from a shared hosting account. That's the reason VPSs and Dedicated Servers are still needed. But.....given the newer "cloud" services becoming available their days may be numbered.

Customers like your client with the massive amount of storage need dedicated servers, not just for the amount of diskspace available but to acheive the performance levels they want (and probably the privacy and security requirements too), and they pay for this.

On the other hand, you'd have to question the sanity of someone who thought that just because there was no limits to their diskspace that this represented some sort of nirvana where they will be able to run their Facebook clone empire from a single shared hosting account. It shows a complete lack of understanding of what's really on offer (unlimited space, not unrestricted or unlimited performance), and that's where my problem with "unlimited" lies.

No, but when it comes to arrays it's not that simple to separate, and not really that relevant. There is no actual "loss". We've both run hosting companies for years so we both understand the economics of the hosting offers we make. If we want to remain competitive, with reasonably attractive plans, we have to offer decent resources in terms of space and features and be priced correctly.

We also both know that if every single customer used all of the resources made available to them we'd probably (nay, definitely) be losing money. It's a well-calculated risk, because we both know that the majority of users aren't going to use anywhere near the resources the hosting plan provides. In fact, over 99.9% of your customers would be able to work with the smallest hosting plan you have available but many choose larger plans instead. The result is that the majority of customers who use only a fraction of their available resources end up financing/subsidising those customers that use near to the limits...it's always been this way.

In the example you cite, with customers using huge amounts of diskspace, this is just a slightly more extreme example of what has been happening in hosting companies for years, with the majority of customers subsidising the small percentage of higher resource customers. The difference in this case is that with storage area networks huge amounts of diskspace are available, and it wouldn't need any new servers to be provisioned just to provide a single customer with that diskspace. I wouldn't mind coughing up for a couple of more hard drives in an array to cement a reputation. I'd know that the number of customers who were going to use the amount of diskspace where I would need to be concerned would be such a tiny percentage that it would be of no real consequence in the scheme of things, and I'd maintain a reputation as the company who does what they say they will because it would be economically viable to do so.

As an aside, this ability to re-allocate finances and costs from one group of customers to another is part of a mature company with good finances and an understanding of what they are doing. The smaller providers, or those whose finances are shaky, don't have enough volume of accounts to cover the costs of the higher-resource customer (still within the hosting plan limits but actually costing the company money). That's one of the main reasons so many hosts fail very quickly (people simply don't understand the economics), or it causes hosts to close accounts down for spurious reasons. I'm sure this is one of the reasons why "unlimited" gets a bad press from users who've been burned. But, it doesn't change the fact that I still say that unlimited is possible...it's just not possible for a large proportion of the hosting industry because they don't have the equipment, the experience, the customers, or the finances to do it.

 

Great points Ron, and I agree with most of them. Wish I had time right now to reply to them in-depth. Possibly in a bit.

I did want to address the HG issue briefly though. My CPU usage according to their control panel never went above 0.9%, with 0 alerts, but I know it was me causing the massive load issues. I actually think it might have been the hard drive running out of space, or something...I honestly don't know. But the loads would escalate and the server would crash as soon as I went back to uploading. Sometimes disk space would even go backwards. Not exactly sure what was happening there, but I went from 55GB down to 45'ish, so maybe the server was trying to clean itself up? No clue. All I know is that there was over 30 minutes of downtime yesterday alone on that server. Almost had to hit some physical limit.

 

As far as I know this thing does not exist. Its more like 'all you can eat' buffets and unlimited coke refills at pizza hut.

The chances are your stomach will be full before you can really run them out of coke or pizza - and the same with the hosting - the chances are you will get a few hits a day and upload a few Mb and they'll be OK with that.

 

Unlimited=Limited. In case of shared\cloud hosting servers resources are devided between customers.
Thats why if some costomer will consume much resources you wont get them.
For hardware there no term unlimited, its just marketing.
Hoster may only provide you unlimited traffic, but most of all cases
they will reduce speed.

 

these words are highly fake, each and every one does have their limits. Unlimited, cheap, free hosting are never reliable. Better go for a reputed and reliable one. I am with cloudclaim since long, they do have fair discount plans with them for web hosting, Its good to pay few bugs and get a good service

 

Unlimited term is just a marketing. Companies know that most of users wont use all resources, thats why call some features as unlimited.

 

Yesterday i contacted hostgator and x10hosting regarding backingup and site restorations. This is how the story went. I think everybody should read this

http://galaxiess2.blogspot.com/2012/05/how-did-this-all-start-i-will-narrate.html