When looking for a website hosting plan in the many companies out there, it is reasonably common that when looking at the features and resources, you find instead of a value, the word unlimited
.
What does that mean? Is this an unlimited hosting plan? Is it real or false advertising?
Demystifying the question, answering in a clear and understandable way and understanding everything that is related, is our proposal in this post.
What is unlimited hosting?
Unlimited hosting is the name given to shared hosting plans in which some of their features do not have a limit in advance established or determined and for this reason, it is conventionally called unlimited.
So perhaps it would be more appropriate to inform that there is “no defined limit”?
Strictly, yes. It would be better, but still, it could lead to the same understanding.
It is understandable that people associate that a plan that appears as unlimited for traffic or disk space, means that it has values infinity, after all, both words appear as synonyms in several dictionaries.
To understand the reason for this nomenclature, it is necessary to know the evolution of the hosting market.
The emergence of unlimited hosting
Currently, a simple institutional website based on WordPress can easily consume 300 MB or even more. But it wasn’t always like that.
Even at the time of the popularization and commercial advance of the Internet, when there were not as many hosting options as there are today, having 300 MB of storage could cost unfeasible values for a personal blog or a micro-company website with more content.
It was then that some companies in the sector, by observing the use that most users made, it was possible to innovate in what was offered.
When the idea of creating plans that did not have specific limits came up, the objective was that small companies, liberal professionals, self-employed, a freelancer or even an individual who has their personal website or wanted to create a blog, they didn’t have to worry about frequently monitoring the resources used as they grew and expanded their websites or used the email service more for doing business.
Consume slightly above average space used to store website or email messages or rec Having a small additional traffic generated by the corresponding increase in visitors should not be an obstacle for them to invest in their digital presence, as it implies an investment that was often expensive for them.
In short, you don’t need to pay more to grow and develop.
We understand that this is natural, it is positive, it is what everyone is looking for and, by favoring this situation, who took the first steps in this direction, he was flexible, cordial and a partner of his clients!
What has changed? Why does unlimited hosting have limits?
As much as the Internet has its characteristics and differentials in relation to the real world, there is no way to totally disconnect it from the aspects and relationships that govern how things happen and are.
Similarly, if you live in a community, which is the case for many people, you are not told how many times you can use the elevator in your building, or how many pages you have printed on the printer of the department in which you work, or how many times you fill the glass of soda in the fast food chain, or a series of other situations where limits are not clearly and precisely established.
All this is commonplace, as long as the intense use of the elevator does not prevent other tenants from doing so, the work sent to the printer allows other company employees to also use it when they need to and other fast food customers, can also consume the available soft drink.
Thus, the good s enso and more than that, the democratic principle of equality, must ensure that everyone can enjoy in equal conditions of everything they share.
It is their right not prevailing over the right of the another.
In unlimited hosting, it was not imagined that it would be different.
Particularly in the case of shared hosting, this aspect is crucial, since in this model, through a server, you share the e-mail service, the access service to the sites (web server), the database service, the FTP service and other systems and services that make up a hosting.
That is, the accesses to your site cannot be so many as to interfere negatively in the accesses to the sites of other users. The messages you send cannot delay other emails from other domains from reaching their recipients.
The same concept applies to each service that is made available to you in this “split” use. you have from the hosting environment.
What are the limits of unlimited hosting?
The limits of unlimited hosting vary and establish them would be a contradiction to everything we have explained so far.
Returning to the condominium analogy, the manager does not stipulate how many times a year the ballroom can be used, or the elevator, gourmet space, weight room or other benefit of the condominium, provided that the use is reasonable and does not interfere with the right of other residents to also do so.
Varies from according to the use of others, with the availability of resources, with the frequency with which the eventual “abuse” is committed and with a form of use that does not bring harm of any kind to others.
But it can also be compared to another situation in the real world and some self-service restaurants or even all-you-can-eat restaurants, where you can eat all you want and pay a single fee, as long as there is no waste.
Including in some of them, although prohibited by the Consumer Defense Code, a “waste fee” is charged if it is found that the customer has served himself excessively and has not consumed.
Whatever the In this case, you cannot request that the entire skewer of picanha remain on your table or take the entire platter of fries to your table, even though the restaurant’s philosophy is “eat as you like” and in the case of accommodation, it is unlimited!
Respect for others and the rules of harmonious coexistence must always prevail.
When is unlimited hosting no longer enough?
In the real world as your business grows, you can deploy and be able to reallocate resources, manage time better, minimize waste, provide training, and to appease employees so that they are more productive, but there comes a point in this growth, when it will be necessary to hire more employees, invest in machinery, more raw materials, move to a larger building and even pay more taxes.
It is an organic phenomenon and it will not be much different with hosting.
Depending on the growth you present, the time will come when you will need an infrastructure that meet your new needs and we believe that’s why you work.
Roughly speaking, situations can be many, but the most common is:
- E-mail – significant increase in the number of professional e-mail accounts, in the space destined for their storage and the volume of sending and receiving. This condition can affect both processing and disk space;
- Visit – a high number of visits, whether from just one site or from all hosted domains, can impact server performance, due to processing, number of processes and RAM memory allocation;
- Use of resources – even if the visitation is not high, but if the site to work it allocates a lot of processing, or generates a high number of processes, or consumes a lot of memory, or worse, the combination of all these;
- Many domains – you can have little of the above in each hosted domain, but the sum of all of them combined, results in high overall values;
- Site features – evolving and even updating the site often means installing plugins , change the schedule or even create an e-co mmerce or a blog that did not exist before and all this leads to more demand for the hosting environment.
For whom is unlimited hosting suitable?
Most of the hosting plans used at HostMídia and in many companies are plans unlimited and that lend themselves very well to almost all micro and small companies, professionals and freelancers.
In general, having two, three or even more domains and their respective websites, with a few hundred daily visits and a half or a dozen email accounts for each is the typical scenario, but always in medium terms and small variations.
In other words, the purpose of creating unlimited plans, is still the same and that is to allow flexible plans that meet variations and small growths, without the need to change plans.
As mentioned, it is enough a variation, such as a company blog that starts doing more success or a plugin installed that is a processing hog and that reality can change.
What is not allowed to host in unlimited plans?
As in the case of limits, there may be differences according to the hosting, but in general, most restrict the following aspects:
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- Use as a virtual disk – it must be borne in mind that it is a website hosting and, therefore, intended to host what has a close relationship with the website. Nothing that is not essential to its functioning is usually admitted;
- Backup – store backup, even if it is from the website itself and which, in this case, goes against an essential principle that backup copies lose their usefulness when they are on the same media as the content to which they refer;
- Third-party domains – it is not allowed to host third-party domains, even if they are a close relative or spouse , in the same way that you don’t just pay a self-service fee for the couple. The service suitable for this purpose is the reseller hosting;
- Game sites – games can often be resource intensive and are more susceptible to attacks;
- Streaming – audio and video streaming services, consume large volumes of bandwidth and traffic depending on the number of users;
- Conducting tests – tests are allowed, but a test phase is temporary and short-lived. Keeping test content indefinitely, both consumes disk space that is not from an active site, and can represent vulnerable content due to outdated and pose a security risk to the environment. Inactive websites belong to this category and for the same reasons;
- Download sites – sites like Baixaqui that are intended for downloading software, in addition to consuming bandwidth and traffic much above average, also allocate a lot of disk space.
Conclusion
Despite the apparent contradiction, unlimited hosting can restrict what is hosted whenever performance of the shared environment is threatened.
