Unlimited Disk Space / Unlimited Bandwidth

Recently due to the stiff competition in the hosting market, the larger companies are offering unlimited plans. To the average user, this looks like a great deal. And why not, hell, you could run ebay.com on a $10 website. No reason to go spend a million dollars on hardware when $10 will do the same thing or more. As a matter of fact, you run the entire Internet on one $10 website.

At least that is the image they paint for you. But the truth is far from the offer they advertise in bold print. In fact even offering an unlimited plan is illegal in most states. There are strict laws governing inflated advertising claims or making claims that are later refuted in their contracts.

So how are they doing this?

Simple, they set up a terms of service that makes it impossible to use the space. In the case of Yahoo.com they blatantly state that you must use space appropriately. A term so vague that they can cut you off at any point if you use too much.

We think it is disgusting for hosting companies to offer services that can't possibly deliver. They are abusing customer trust and making all hosting companies look like common thieves.

How can a small company gain customer trust when all the big companies are offering 100 times more for 1 tenth of the price?

We all know that hard drives have finite space and most of these unlimited providers will state that in their TOS believing that it releases them from liability when the users can't actually get unlimited space. In fact it just makes them look shady because they advertise one thing on their front page and then hide limits and disclaimers in their Terms Of Service.

Horrified by these services and the impact they are making on our industry, I signed up for an account with 1TB of space and unlimited bandwidth.

I proceeded to build 8 websites using less than 1GB of space which was only 1/1000 of what I was paying for. And at first everything seemed fine. I was actually surprised that the sites were accessible and generating some income.

Then the shit hit the fan. One of the websites was closed for excessive system resource usage.

The site was HTML pages only, no programing, no ftp access, no email, nothing. Traffic was maybe 100 pages a day if that.

Apparently a bot came in and crawled too many pages too fast and my site was closed. The host sent me an e-mail telling me I violated their TOS by using too many resources.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME!

But to make matters worse, I had to fill in a support ticket and wait 2 days for a response. There entire time my site was closed and traffic was redirected to the hosting companies parking pages where they were serving paid ads on my domain, to my customers.

I was also locked out of FTP access, so I could not remove, update or access anything. Also I could not even access the stats to see what happened.

This is the equivalent of renting a house and having the landlord lock you out and go on vacation leaving you a note that you had 2 cars in the driveway and that is not expected since you are only one person.

At the time of this posting, the site has been down for 2 weeks with no way to rectify the situation.

Then last week I noticed another site which had about 200,000 html pages for 200,000 products and the database had been completely deleted. So all the data to direct customers to the retail websites where the products were being sold was deleted by the host. This site is still up, but obviously not working correctly.

It is a total joke. But in their terms of service they say that they can delete any amount of your data if they need the space even if you have not used all the space your account allows.

I could upload the data files again, but it takes 36 hours plus because they have a 5 minute FTP timeout, so you have to reconnect every 5 minutes and can't upload or download any file that takes more than 5 minutes.

So how do you run a business when the host can shut down, remove or redirect your website at any time for any reason based on their own personal desires?

I knew better than to sign up for one of these too good to be true plans, but I had to see for myself how good or bad they actually were.

You don't have to take my word for it, read any of the forums, blogs or webmaster articles. We are all saying the same thing.

If you plan to run a business online you need to avoid anyone that is offering a deal that looks too good to be true. If you think it wont happen to you, guess again. Don't take risks with your business to save a few dollars a month.

If it looks too good to be true, then it probably is.