Unlimited Hosting is a Myth. Sort of.

Five or so years ago and earlier, web hosting companies had very strictly defined hosting plans. Strict limits were placed on storage, bandwidth, e-mail accounts, databases — heck, many didn’t even offer databases unless you were on a business or development package.

But the tide slowly turned, and now it’s as common to see an unlimited hosting package as a limited one. Hosting is a fiercely competitive market, and many providers are now offering unlimited disk space, bandwidth, add-on domains, email accounts, MySQL databases, and more. But are they really unlimited? It seems I always inadvertently find a way to put them to the test!

Many hosting experts will argue that unlimited plans are nothing more than a marketing ploy, and that no hosting package can be truly unlimited. That’s an undeniable fact. Logic dictates that there must be a finite limit. Hosts can provide an expanding amount of hard disk space by chaining servers in a series (or a cloud, or several other ways). So when one disk reaches capacity, they simply add another drive or server. The same principle applies to bandwidth. When a hosting company’s bandwidth allowance is near capacity, they simply buy more from their provider. But all hosts will reach a point where there is no economic advantage to adding more space or bandwidth.

That’s why unlimited hosting is a myth, a marketing ploy. It’s only unlimited as long as the web hosting provider gains an economic benefit from calling the plan “unlimited.” Luckily for them, and the reason why the unlimited branding works, is that 99 percent of web sites use a tiny amount of server resources. The bulk of hosting customers overestimate their disk space and bandwidth needs. “When my site takes off . . .” I have had a shared account in the past where I shared a server with 1200 other web sites — and got incredibly snappy performance!

So that leaves is with the 1 percent of customers who actually use a large amount of resources. The bad apples, if you will. I’m a bad apple. Not intentionally, mind you, but inevitably one of my shared hosting sites begins consuming too many resources and I become a bad neighbor. Maybe it’s a traffic spike, a new script I’m testing out, who knows. Then I learn what “unlimited” really means. It generally means that my account is moved to a provisioning server while I sort out what is consuming the most resources. Then I move that site to one of my dedicated servers. Easy enough, but inconvenient, and certainly not “unlimited.”

Another issue I have with unlimited hosting is that while bandwidth might be unlimited, throughput is throttled. I was shocked the first time I placed a large file on an unlimited server for sharing. 30MB took over 8 minutes to download — conversely, the same file downloads in under a minute on a dedicated box.

So, if you are looking for an unlimited hosting package because you have many terabytes of data that you want to host, have an application that consumes a lot of CPU time, or require high throughput, then you would probably be better off using a dedicated server. But if that’s the case, I doubt you’re reading this article.

For the remaining 99% of customers who will not be an undue strain on a hosting company’s shared resources, then an unlimited package is worth considering because of all the other unlimited features you can use. For example, you may have many domains, each needing their own website. The individual websites probably won’t take up excessive disk space so your unlimited account won’t be suspended. Add-on domains are perfect for this. Maybe you want to setup several Wordpress blogs — go ahead, you have multiple MySQL databases available.

So unlimited hosting really isn’t unlimited. But it’s close enough for most of us.