I finally figured out the web hosting business’ trick of the trade. It always boggled my mind that shared web hosting providers progressed from 100mb disk space and 3000mb of bandwidth a few years ago to “UNLIMITED” disk space and bandwidth for the same or even less cost. The cost is as little as $6 per month for all that web server power. How can they do that? Do they have infinite hard drives and unlimited resources for bandwidth? For a long time I wondered… what’s the catch? Well, I figured it out:

“Unlimited” does NOT include CPU usage and Memory.

Those have hard limits. Something as benign as a moderately popular blog (1000 – 2000 daily visits) will crash the server. If it doesn’t crash the server, the site will get shut down by the resource management software running the server so that it does not crash everyone else’s website that is sharing that server. When this happens, you will get a friendly note from your web host that your site is exceeding server resources and needs to scale-back or move to a more powerful server. Of course this is not limited to $6 shared hosting plans; it also applies to VPS hosting.

VPS (Virtual Private Server) is the step between shared hosting and dedicated. It gives you virtual control over your virtual server. However, the same limitations apply. Smaller VPS plans have as little as 128MB of RAM (memory). To put this in perspective, the average PC you can buy at your local PC retailer comes with 2GB (that’s GIGA BYTES) of ram while your basic VPS has 128MB (MEGA). It doesn’t take long to find out that your memory gets maxed out easily and you need to upgrade.

The bottom line is that your account is limited by the CPU and Memory allotted for your hosting account.  Hosting companies have the right to sell their services as they see fit. I do not claim that they are not offering adequate services or that they are ripping anyone off. I will say that by promoting “UNLIMITED” disk space and bandwidth they are deceiving people. Its misinformation and deceptive to say “UNLIMITED” when there are other limitations. Its sort of like a restaurant promoting an “all you can eat” buffet, but when you get there you find out that its all you can eat that fits on one plate. You can pile on the food, but you are in fact limited.

The real trick is that for the average small static website CPU and memory are never an issue. But as your website grows, you’ll find out that you don’t have what you thought you had and you will have to pay more. This is all well and good. The reason that it is questionable is that by promoting “UNLIMITED” stuff, they are not telling you the truth.

In the end, I respect businesses and entrepreneurship, but I don’t like deceptive marketing. I wish there were a host that would offer straight facts about the hosting service they are offering and disclose ALL the limitations up front, not buried in the 900 page terms and conditions that no one ever fully reads. Maybe I’ll start my own straight talk hosting service. I will give all the details right up front without deceptive marketing tactics. But then again, its hard to compete with “UNLIMITED” anything.