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Unlimited Hosting, The Myth

By Simson Brown


The old chestnut goes "you never get something for nothing", so it is with web hosting. Before we even begin, let us be clear, there is not any such monster as unlimited. It does not exist. The word is a legendary dragon that you are going to never see but always hear about.

Disk space on a server is defined. It exists on a platter or flash memory. And it does have a limit and a set cost. Bandwidth is also limited. Each information pipe has a set speed and a set amount of information that can go through that pipe. So how can any host offer unlimited of either of these. Answer is: they can not.

Routinely, a hosting company has wording buried in their terms of serviced to address this. They may constrain the amount of CPU or share of server load or functions that a consumer can take up. And these limits will come into affect well before you get close to the mystical point of infinity. So , with so many hosting providers offering unlimited disk space and bandwidth, you should educate yourself on where and when these provisions of service limits will be reached? In the case of storage space, the larger the disk and the more folks on the disk, the slower the accesses for data. And if a hosting company is a very good one and keeps backups, every meg in play is essentially doubled. On a shared web hosting environment you must take typical disk drive space and divide it by the quantity of buyers. The most typical disk drive a host uses is a 1 terabyte platter. We are going to leave flash drives out of this talk as they are too expensive at the time of this writing (but they are coming down in price gradually). If a host earns $4 each from every user, you can expect their break even point to be around 20 users. So every user should get about a 500 meg share. Naturally, the standard user will use a lot less. So accounting for the "tiny users" 1 gig is a fair assessment for a shared web hosting account. If you're getting that, you're being treated fairly. If you are getting 5-10 gigs of storage space on a shared web hosting account, you have to wonder how the hosting company is earning money off you and this should be a concern. The condition of your web site links to the health of the server you are on. Do yourself and your hosting company a solid if you're anywhere near 5 gigs and ask them for semi dedicated or dedicated solution so your hosting provider can make cash and you can stay safe as well.

On the bandwidth end, it is more difficult to judge. Very big data pipes are readily available and you would exceed the CPU of any shared server well before you got close to eclipsing an information pipe. Therefore you may usually get close to the appearance of unlimited bandwidth with just about any host as long as you are running a standard size site.

So is unlimited web hosting worth it? If you are accepting the word "unlimited" isn't totally correct and you are running a small to medium site, then yes. But do not expect to run streaming video, high cpu loads or anything that effects other users, otherwise unlimited will swiftly turn into zero. Be honest with yourself and your needs and you may keep your host and yourself contented in the long-term.

Unlimited hosting is still a good choice for most personal websites and medium traffic business web sites because it is very cheap.




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