eVerity’s Blog

Why eVerity Does Not Offer Unlimited Hosting

“Unlimited” hosting has recently become wildly popular in the hosting world. Companies big and small offer “unlimited” disk space and “unlimited” bandwidth because it works great for attracting new customers. You really can’t blame new customers for falling for a gimick they don’t understand.

If hosting were really unlimited, then for $5.00 per month you could host a site like Google or Yahoo that would get millions of hits per day. You could become the next YouTube. You could set up a forum with hundreds of thousands of users. You could host the next big social networking site like MySpace or Facebook. You could become a billionaire with only a $5.00 per month investment. Even if your dreams are more realistic, it is still nice to think that you have “unlimited” capacity, so on the surface it sounds like a great deal.

I keep putting “unlimited” in quotes because it is not possible. There is no such thing as an unlimited hard drive or unlimited bandwidth. There are physical limits to everything. In the case of “unlimited” hosting plans, there are also hidden “fine print” limits. For example, they can terminate your site for any of the following reasons:

-You store a backup of your data

-There is a spike in your web site traffic that uses more than X amount of server resources, even if the spike only happens once and only lasts for a few seconds.

-You upload more than X number of files.

-You host content for someone else, or you upload any files that are not directly related to your site, or accessible by following links from your home page.

In other words, even though it is advertised as unlimited, it really isn’t. If you use a lot of disk space, bandwidth, or resources, you run the risk of being kicked off their system.

You don’t have to settle for this. The good news is that you don’t need unlimited space. 98% of web sites use less than 1 GB of space, less than 5 GB of monthly transfer (bandwidth), and less than 1% of server resources (cpu).

If you choose a hosting package with realistic, published limits, then you don’t have to worry about all those other restrictions that are hidden in the fine print of “unlimited” hosts, or hosts offering ridiculously high numbers. For example, eVerity’s Standard Package is big enough for 98% of web sites, and you can use it any way you want so long as your site isn’t doing anything illegal or causing excessive load on the server.

So, in closing, eVerity does not offer “unlimited” disk space or transfer because it seems unfair and dishonest, and because I don’t want our customers to have to worry about a bunch of fine print or cryptic terminology.

Maybe the day will eventually come when all hosts offer unlimited packages, and I will have to reconsider. For now, I feel like the current way of doing things results in a much higher quality service overall.

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