Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

April 28, 2011

Understanding Unlimited Hosting Features

With web hosting plans including so many features it can be difficult to conduct an accurate comparison, especially for the novice webmaster. Perhaps even more confusing is the fact that even the cheapest plans offer unlimited features, and to many the process of comparing two plans that both have unlimited features doesn't make much sense. Two features that are almost always promised to be unlimited are bandwidth and disk space. Bandwidth limitations dictate the amount of information that can be transmitted from the web server that you are leasing to your visitor's computers at any given time. For example, a web hosting plan that allows 1 GB of bandwidth would mean that you could send 1 GB of information to all of your site visitors accumulatively at one point in time. So how is it that the cheapest hosting plans offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space?

Paying for Honesty

Perhaps even more confusing is the fact that expensive hosting plans do indeed have specific bandwidth and disk space limitations listed. Make no mistake, all hosting plans have limitations because the server resources being allocated to each customer are limited by the capabilities of the web server or network that is powering the hosting plan. In fact, many people purchase a shared hosting plan because of the unlimited features, only to receive an e-mail from their hosting provider stating that they are exceeding bandwidth or disk space limitations. In essence, most hosting providers that offer unlimited features are using this as a marketing tactic to solicit new customers, with the realization that more than 90% of webmasters will never exceed the hidden restrictions. Thus, when you purchase a comprehensive hosting plan you are not only paying for more server resources, you're also paying for the honesty of knowing the true restrictions.

How to Obtain Truly Unlimited Features

The only way to obtain a truly unlimited hosting plan would be to use the cloud hosting environment, which allows you to instantly and infinitely expand on the spur of the moment. This is possible because the cloud hosting environment powers websites not with a single web server, but with a network of servers simultaneously. In other words, when your websites traffic levels cause the server resources of a single server to become exhausted, then the cloud hosting environment the tasks will be allocated to another server to maintain optimal performance at all times. Cloud hosting not only offers unlimited expandability, it also utilizes a unique billing structure, in which the customer is only charged for the server resources that they use each billing period.

Is Unlimited Really Needed?

For most people the answer to this question is a clear and resounding no. Only a miniscule percentage of webmasters actually need access to unlimited server resources. Even a network of 10 to 20 websites usually will not require anything more than a mediocre VPS hosting plan ranging in cost from $50-$100 per month. Nonetheless, if you're not sure about your hosting needs and you would like to ensure the continuity and performance of your websites, then the aforementioned cloud hosting environment would be most suitable.

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