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The Dirty Truth Behind “Unlimited” Hosting and Overselling

With individuals and businesses relying more on website performance than ever, it’s important to understand the capabilities and limitations of hosting services.    One thing to watch out for when choosing a web hosting provider is overselling. This is when a hosting company has sold more space than its servers actually have, or has included services in its contracts that it will never be able to provide if every customer takes full advantage of their offerings.

Below is an example:

A hosting company has 500 GB (gigabytes) in a given server, and they offer 2 GB plans. Assuming they don’t oversell, they have space on this server for 250 customers on a hosting plan of this size. If the hosting company chooses to oversell, assuming that most customers will never use the extent of the 2GB to which they are entitled, they might sell space on the same server to 500 or even 1,000 customers. This can negatively impact the speed, reliability, and overall performance of the server – not to mention the inevitable problems that would occur if enough customers actually used the space to which they were entitled.

The Problem with Overselling

Overselling is a rather insidious way for a web hosting company to boost its profit margin at the expense of consumers. This doesn’t always affect the quality of the service you receive, but it can: a higher server load means that it will run slower and be less efficient. It can also result in more server down time and lower quality of service all around.

“Unlimited” Hosting and Overselling

In cases when overselling goes hand in hand with “unlimited” hosting, the potential problems are even worse – not because it’s necessarily more likely to overload the hosting servers, but because these types of unrestricted hosting plans tend to come with loopholes and caveats that make them anything but unlimited.

Think about it this way: A hosting company offers “unlimited” hosting plans on their servers. Do they have a magical, unlimited server with infinite space? Of course not. They’re using the same servers as they would if they offered regular, limited plans.

As an example, let’s say it’s the same 500 GB server we referenced above. Despite this limited amount of server space, the company offers “unlimited” space to its customers – but they usually do so with a loophole that allows them to cancel your account and close down your website with no warning if you reach certain other limits. They can’t restrict the size of your website, but they may impose strict conditions in the fine print of their hosting contract, such as limits on CPU usage, inodes, memory, and email usage.

For consumers who don’t understand the details of web hosting services, an “unlimited” hosting package may seem like a terrific bargain – until they inadvertently violate obscure clause in their contract and suddenly have their account terminated because they exceeded a limit of which they weren’t aware.

“Unlimited” hosting plans are the worst kind of oversellers, because they take advantage of consumers’ good faith to make more money, without providing the services that they appear to offer. There’s very little the average consumer can do about these kinds of scams other than educating yourself and learning enough to avoid them.