We all have seen a lot of hosting companies offering unlimited hosting, with unlimited disk usage and unlimited traffic for 1-3$. But is this really unlimited?

First lets start with the facts:

1. A servers costs money and has limited capacity.
2. The traffic is limited and exceeding it costs more money of the connection is limit.

 

A typical low/mid-tier shared hosting server has ~3TB of disks. This means you have about 1TB of pure space if you want to have backups on the same machine. If not then you have more cost.

A typical low/mid-tier server has ~30TB traffic, and then each TB costs ~2$.

 

So how can you offer “unlimited” disk space and “unlimited” traffic if your server has limits? And also a lot of clients will abuse the hosting since you offer “unlimited” disk space.

 

Facts about “unlimited” hosting providers (in order to avoid lawsuits I am required to say that this does not represent the majority of providers and is simply a personal opinion)

1. I have tried a lot of “unlimited” hosting providers and everytime I had a lot of files (more than 5gb) or high traffic the account was suspended.
2. Cheap no-name hardware. Branded servers cost more and are more reliable.
3. If your website has high resource usage you will be suspended.
4. If you send a lot of emails you will be suspended.
5. If you have more than 300-400gb per month traffic you will be suspended.
6. Support takes a lot of time to respond.
7. No refunds in case of downtime.

 

So do you prefer to pay 1$ for a server that is oversold and slow, or pay 7-10$ for a provider that does not oversell neither overloads his servers, and provides perfect support?

 

There are 2 scenarios:

1. You have a personal website and want cheap hosting. – Go for blogger.com or don’t do it…
2. You have a company and you have a lot of data or traffic. – Going for a cheap provider is like using a race driver to run with a scooter against a Lamborghini…
3. You have a website that has heavy cpu/ram or I/O usage. – It will be slow. Period.

 

The choice is yours… what you pay is what you get(in most cases).

 

 

PS

I am resisting the temptation to promote my hosting company really hard!!

 

PS no.2

Soon a head to head comparison with the same server with regular HDD disks, & SAS disks vs SSD disks 🙂 (spoiler: SSD ftw)