gim·mick
–noun
1. an ingenious or novel device, scheme, or stratagem, esp. one designed to attract attention or increase appeal.
2. a concealed, usually devious aspect or feature of something, as a plan or deal: An offer that good must have a gimmick in it somewhere.
3. an offer for unlimited bandwidth and/ or unlimited disk storage on any web hosting plan.

What’s wrong with this offer? Its not exactly true. Nothing in web hosting is unlimited. Common sense will tell you that.

So what is it then? Its a marketing ploy, plain and simple. Realize that all servers are limited. For example, here’s an offer for six months free hosting with all the unlimited stuff you can want. Now, don’t get me wrong… if you are a very small website and don’t think you will grow much in the next year or two… go for the cheap stuff. There really is nothing wrong with that.

Back to the point. There is no such thing as a computer with infinite bandwidth and storage.  Moreover, if it were legitimate, why would larger companies have to pay hundreds (or thousands) per month on dedicated servers… with clearly defined limitations? Maybe their IT people are stupid and they should put eBay on one of these unlimited web hosting plans for $5 per month.

One way to tell if something rings true or not is to take it to its logical extreme. Using eBay or Amazon as an example, you can see that there is a reason they spend big money on their limited servers. So what is the catch anyway?  I’ll explain…

The small priced web hosting is in reality shared hosting. This means that you are sharing server space, bandwidth, databases, and IP addresses with hundreds or thousands of other small websites. If they can cram 5000 websites onto one dedicated server at $5 a pop, that’s $25,000 per month. Of course the have to pay to operate the thing, but lets just say its a nice profit. On a recent domain research project I found the website domain I was researching was on a Godaddy server with 5,283 other websites. WOW.

Is shared hosting bad? No, its a great idea for small websites who do not use a lot of resources. Aye, there’s the rub… who do not use a lot of resources - this is how its done. Those micro sites will never, ever come near the real limitations of the server. As a matter of fact 99% hardly move the needle. So why not give them unlimited stuff… they never really use it anyway. They will think they have the best hosting plan in the world and it will make ANY limitation on any other host seem so restrictive.

So what’s the problem? The problem occurs when you actually do grow and start impacting the server. That’s when the hosting company will remind you of the TOS (terms of service) agreement you agreed to when you started. You know, the 942 page legal document you were suppose to read before you agreed? There they will point out one or several clauses that denote any number of limitations that the average website owner wouldn’t understand even if they actually did read the TOS. The usual suspects are CPU and memory. When a website gets real busy, it uses more CPU and Memory. Each shared account has limits, or at least is monitored for unusual increases in activity. Once you trigger the alarm, you will be asked to kindly slow down the usage of your server, or upgrade.

I did a test with hostmonster.com who offer their bogus “Unlimited” cheap hosting. I set up my hosting server with about 40 accounts to run backups and save those backups on the Unlimited hostmonster.com account. It worked well for a while until I got a notice that I violated the TOS because I was storing backup files on my hosting account.  Oh.. so it is limited? Certain files are forbidden such a .zip or .rar. Really? That’s a surprise.

Another example is when I had a client site, whom I was doing SEO work and help make their site much stronger in the search engines. After a while they were getting much busier than ever and some blog posts were taking on a few hundred visitors per day. This slowed the site badly and eventually it was shut down by the host. The reason; too much traffic was causing CPUand memory issues. We had to upgrade it.

Anyone can test this for themselves. Jut move a site that has a decent amount of traffic to a host like hostmonster.com and promote it well. Or if you are lucky or good enough to have a strong site already, try it on one of these unlimited hosts. It won’t take long before you are forced to move or upgrade.

When this happens, I strongly recommend that you move to a host that does not offer such nonsense. If you upgrade with one of these unlimited gimmickers they accomplished their goal with you; lured you in then forced you to pay more. That’s their whole point. It is better to find a more reliable and honest host to begin with. Here’s a premium hosting plan that is about the same price as those cheap “unlimited hosting” plans but has actual limits? Wonder why? Because its higher quality hosting and they don’t get gimmicky.

Most users do not benefit from these supposed non-limitations because they do not use enough resources to even need such a thing. The truth is found in the users who do put it to the test and find out what the limitations really are.  Its just a dishonest marketing trick, plain and simple. Why trust companies who count on your ignorance to sell you their product? After reading this, you are no longer ignorant.

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