Unlimited Web Hosting ~ True Facts

When you are searching for web hosts and doing research for selecting your webhost, you may find that almost all of the webhosts are providing:

# Unlimited web space
# Unlimited bandwidth
# Unlimited domains hosting

So what exactly does that mean? Most people are happy with the package structure and generally go for that.
Even better; the hosting company give offered you almost 30-50% off if you subscribe for 3 or more years at a time. So what now? Are you totally convinced?
In my point of view you should not be convinced with these kind of plans. Let's discuss why.

Is Unlimited space possible ?
Obviously it is not possible, Have you ever hard of an unlimited hard disk?

As most people are using very less space for their websites, and as most of the websites are database driven the uses of web space is getting decreased.So if a web host provider have a space of 200 GB hard disk and 100 clients on that server; they should not offer more than 0.5 gb of space but they know that even that amount space will not be used. There will be a huge amount of free space if 100 general user clients use them.

A very common way to limit space is introducing the concept of inodes. If you check properly all unlimited shared hosting plan have limited inodes. And this inode is nothing but the number of files. Most CMS have almost 4000-10000 files and if you are using too many images then inode may be a critical factor while choosing a web hosting.

I have a website where I have around 600 long articles, 200 pictures and that website is merely using 50 MB of space .

Yes that’s the fact.

Now if I describe share hosting packages in a different way
I may say :

# You can use Unlimited space until you are using a maximum 10-25% CPU resources and have limited number of files.
# You can have Unlimited bandwidth until you are using a maximum 10-25% CPU resources.
# You can host Unlimited domains until you are using a maximum 10-25% CPU resources.
So here is the truth actually they all limit your uses of space or bandwidth to a certain limit.

So everyone can provide unlimited bandwidth the only thing you need to understand (as the customer) that you have limited connection and you will not be able to up/down data more than X amount of GB per month.

So how exactly limited CPU resources can harm your website?

These days most of the websites are database driven so each time a page refreshed it runs 100s of queries and generate a html page for the viewers, and to run these queries you server is using CPU resources.

PHP is a programming language and your website which is written in PHP is actually not the web pages which are visited. PHP generates html pages for the viewers and that takes a lot of cpu resources.And as you know the most popular CMS like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento all are using PHP and Mysql.
So if you have websites which have a lot of nice widgets and you are getting more than 1000-2000 visitor per day you may get a suspension letter from your web host provider because you are taking too much CPU resources and guess what? They will not refund your money in this case .

So if you have paid for 5 years at a time and used their service for 9 months you will not get refund for remaining 4 year 3 months. Then they will ask you for their vps or dedicated server .

It is simple you can see that all dedicated server has limited bandwidth because in real situation the word “unlimited” doesn't exist, it's like the classic "Eat as you can buffet" - Some restaurant label it as "Unlimited Buffet" - Yes, you pay a modest fee, then you'll eat how much you can but when the buffet arrive to the end... you are not going to eat more. Not at all.
Now, if there are 5 person on that buffet, you can eat a lot. If there are 200 persons, I bet you are not going to eat more than in a regular restaurant, just a first, a second, drink and dessert. Same for hosting, yes... exactly the same.

So the main thing is you must need to know the CPU uses limit and number of files you can actually have in your hosting space.