Your opinions on unlimited hosting

[MasterA]

Hello,

So what are your opinions on unlimited hosting?

 

[R44]

Don't bother. Get a nice dedicated server with a reasonable size drive.

 

[Skyon Archer]

I immensely dislike when people advertise "unlimited" this or "unlimited" that.

There is no way anyone can offer "unlimited" anything. It's a virtual impossibility.

Hosts that say they'll give you Unlimited Disc Space really mean, "we will give you a lot of disc space, but if you start using it up, your account will be suspended". It's called Resource Usage Policy.

Take GoDaddy for instance. They have the "Deluxe" plan which offers "Unlimited Storage". They even say on their web hosting page:

We don't limit the amount of storage and bandwidth your site can use as long as it complies with our Hosting Agreement.

However, that's not true. They do limit the storage. If you visit this page you'll see that in fact they do have limits for the Deluxe plan.

One big thing you'll notice is they restrict the amount of Files (Inodes) you can have within your server space.

Wikipedia defines an Inode as:

In a Unix-style file system, an index node, informally referred to as an inode, is a data structure used to represent a filesystem object, which can be one of various things including a file or a directory. Each inode stores the attributes and disk block location(s) of the filesystem object's data.

Basically, every single thing on your server space is an inode.

So by now you should realize that their Unlimited plan is actually very limited, indeed.

Plus, by now you should know my opinion on Unlimited hosting :rofl:

 

[Black Angel]

No such animal, and for that matter, I wouldn't trust a host that guaranteed it because sh*t happens.

And I am even less trustful of a company that has to add a few decimal places when talking about their uptime.

Where 99.9% uptime becomes 99.98765% uptime.

I am on a host now that guaranteed unlimited bandwidth and boasts a high uptime.

I have spent more time on their support forums and hotline about the various downtimes I've had, and I told them that my site has been down so often that unless they were referring to the server their site and forum was hosted on, that there was no way they could guarantee an uptime that high, especially since I've had to switch servers 3x in the month and a half I've been there, each time due to some idiot abusing the "unlimited" bandwidth and servers. I told them I knew this because I did the math, they agreed and gave me a free month of service.

I am still with this host, even though there's been slight hiccups since then, but mainly because they've been really responsive to my issues whether by email, phone or support forum and despite their astronomical uptime guarantee, I've not had many more issues since then and their support response and BBB rating is why I chose them in the first place.

 

[RH-Calvin]

Unlimited hosting is just a gimmick. Don't bother if you really require ample lot of space and bandwidth for your purposes.

 

[Sam]

This was answered pretty well by a LowEndTalk member:

There are some hosts whose unlimited promises are reasonable. Unlimited in the sense of "number of silicon atoms in the universe" - no. Unlimited in the sense of "pretty much all you could every want - yes. For example, I had ~60GB on a Dreamhost shared account and they didn't care...someone on WHT had > 1TB. Their unlimited policy is reasonable.

Some people get hung up and say "well, I've never seen an infinite hard drive so that's impossible!" but in the sense of "you don't have to worry about disk/bandwidth as long as you're using the service in the spirit it's intended" i don't have an argument with it.

 

[davidwhite]

I personally don't bother, instead I would love to go with some all time good web hosting services like GoDaddy, IX Web Hosting, BlueHost, HostGator, etc. Luckily I'm out of this scene and using IX Web hosting for so long and with this I can happily say that unlike server space out encountered in unlimited web hosting, I've never faced such problems. IX is doing pretty well for my website.

Big Cheers!

 

[Ashley]

Honestly, I don't think there is such a thing as "unlimited" anything. Your allowance point has to end somewhere. This kind of thing never has made sense to me.

 

[Stalin]

won't use a host that gives unlimited or unmetered space or bandwidth. Either I get a VPS or I get shared hosting with a host that allows high resource usages.

 

[vonnch]

For me, this falls under gray are. unlimited really doesn't mean unlimited since users will just tend to abuse that.

 

[ClayXCol]

Personally I had the preconceived notion that unlimited hosting was the best, absolute best. Then I realized there's absolutely no reason to pay $10-$20 more for unlimited versions of hosting when you're not going to get anywhere near enough traffic on your site to cover that cost for months (years most likely).

Pay for what you can pay for, the best that you can for but only IF it's an essential. Otherwise, you're dropping money into someones pocket for no reason (hosting company).

 

[TimeRider]

There is nothing called unlimited as in life and as in this virtual world. There is limit of everything. Unlimited hosting is something which has got tons of web space and bandwidth and the company makes you feel it's unlimited whereas it has got a limit.

 

[Thomasss]

I used "unlimited" hosting and sure it's not unlimited, but I don't have to worry about the data caps and bandwidth usage since my usage differs all the time, and it's usually never something that hosts would deem "abuse of resources" so I usually do not bother. It's more of the peace of mind for smaller sites, and usually most hosts ave some kind of warning in their Terms of Service with what is deemed acceptable and non-acceptable behavior when it comes to bandwidth and storage, so as long as you read that and follow it, I don't see any issues with "Unlimited" hosting.