Trends In Web Hosting

The current trend in web hosting is to give more for less. As competition increases between website hosting companies the marketing teams keep making new offers with bigger values.

Many of the extremely large mega hosting companies are offering unlimited bandwidth, Unlimited disk space, Unlimited e-mail addresses and basically unlimited everything. Even companies like Yahoo are falling victim to these impossible deals and is now offering unlimited disk space for under $10.

Unfortunately for the consumer, these plans are impossible to deliver and they are limited by ridiculous terms of service agreements with crazy conditions such as requiring that the volume of html files is 50% of the volume of disk space of all the files on a server which prevents the upload of video files or using the website ad data storage.

In the case of yahoo, it is almost funny when they say you can use unlimited space as you grow based on how they think your business should grow. So there limit is based on how much coffee they had today or how they feel and if they think the space you are using is suitable for your business. Which can hardly be considered unlimited when the limit is based on someones opinion that is not your own. No business owner wants some outside support rep interfering with their website operations based on opinions.

The trend to offer unlimited resources for under $10 a month is destroying the hosting industry overall and giving the customer fewer and fewer solutions. The servers are overloaded with users to cover costs and the CPUs are throttled back so they wont explode under the high levels of use.

Unfair TOS contracts will close websites that use more than 5% of the CPU because the host has sold unlimited customers full access to the same server. So if you actually have traffic to your website, maybe 5 visitors at the same time, the site could actually close because your website is using what they term as an unfair level of resources and will slow down other websites.

With average servers set at 256 simultaneous web connections, and with the host selling unlimited domains and e-mail to hundreds of people on the same 256 available connections it is impossible for every website to have 1 visitor at the same time.

Customers complain about slow websites, lost sales and extended downtime. With these hosting plans it is unavoidable since they are offering unlimited resources to unlimited people on finite computers.

Although plans like pageBuzz appear to be expensive compared to the offerings that these megahosts provide, it is quite the opposite. It is true we do not offer unlimited anything but we offer proper resource management. Making sure that there are always enough resources available so your website is accessible.

The danger of using an unlimited host is that the resources are limited. This is the primary reason that websites become slow or unreachable and businesses lose sale. In most cases you wont know you are losing sales, you just wont have any sales and question your business model while it is the website that is causing the bottleneck.

You can compare unlimited hosting to unlimited calling on cell phones. Companies struggle with unlimited calling plans and circuits fill up and important calls can't get through. You could not do business with a phone that doesn't ring because other people are using the same line.

Having an unlimited plan is great for a personal home page or a family website. It is lots of space and bandwidth very cheap. With a personal home page you don't really care about uptime or accessibility. Just like a cell phone plan that is free, but you can't always get an open connection. Its not the end of the world if you can't chat with your friend.

However, businesses are in a much different situation and every missed call is a potential lost sale. That type of plan can kill a business or at least damage its reputation.

Businesses need to be weary of hosting plans that offer more than they can possibly deliver. It is inevitable that these megahosting companies that offer unlimited plans are on their last leg and will eventually crumble under the problems they are causing for their customers. Don't let them bring your business down with them.

Every industry experiences hiccups. This is a big one for ours while the megahosts compete for a bigger share and try to knock out the small companies that can actually provide a better service.

As a business owner, you need to make sure you don't get caught up in the battle and stay away from the front line by avoiding plans that seems too good to be true or clearly offer more than they can deliver. Read the TOS thoroughly and look for limits to the unlimited plans they offer.