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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 resources do not have a previously established or determined limit and for this reason, it is conventionally called unlimited.
So maybe it would be more appropriate to say 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 infinite values, after all both words appear as synonyms in several dictionaries.
Understanding the reason for this nomenclature involves knowing the evolution of the hosting market.
The rise of unlimited hosting
Currently, a simple institutional website based on WordPress can easily consume 300 MB or even more. But it was not always so.
Even at the time of the popularization and commercial advancement 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, when observing the use that most users made, it was possible to innovate in what was offered.
When the idea of creating plans that had no 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, would not have to worry about frequently monitor used resources as they grew and expanded their sites or used their email service more for doing business.
Consuming a little above the average space used to store the website or e-mail messages or receiving a small amount of additional traffic generated by the corresponding increase in visitors should not be an obstacle to investing in their digital presence, as it implies an investment that many sometimes it was dear to them.
In short, you don’t have to pay more to grow and develop.
We understand that this is natural, it is positive, it is what everyone is looking for and, in favoring this situation, those who took the first steps in this direction were flexible, cordial and a partner of their customers!
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 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 in the department where you work, or how many times you complete the glass of soda at the fast food chain, or a host of other situations where boundaries 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 it and other fast food customers can also consume the coolant available.
Thus, common sense and more than that, the democratic principle of equality, must ensure that everyone can enjoy on equal terms what they share.
It’s your right not taking precedence over the other’s right.
Unlimited hosting was not thought to 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, access to sites (web server), databases, FTP 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 of the hosting environment.
What are the limits of unlimited hosting?
Unlimited hosting limits vary and setting them would be a contradiction to everything we have explained so far.
Going back to the condominium analogy, the manager does not stipulate how many times a year the ballroom, elevator, gourmet space, weight room or other benefit of the condominium can be used, as long as the use is reasonable and does not interfere the right of other residents to do so too.
It varies according to the use of others, the availability of resources, the frequency with which the eventual “abuse” is committed and a form of use that does not harm others in any way.
But it can also be compared with another situation in the real world and with some self-service or even carvery restaurants, where you can eat all you want and pay a single fee, as long as there is no waste.
Even in some of them, although prohibited by the Consumer Protection Code, a “waste fee” is charged if it is found that the customer has served himself excessively and has not consumed.
Whatever the case, you cannot demand 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 that in the case of accommodation , be 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, train and empower employees to be more productive, but there comes a point in that growth where 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’s an organic phenomenon and it won’t be much different with hosting.
Depending on the growth you present, the time will come when you will need an infrastructure that meets your new needs and we believe that is why you work.
Roughly speaking, the 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 in the volume of sending and receiving. This condition can affect both processing and disk space;
- Visitation – a high number of visits, whether from just one site or from all hosted domains, can impact server performance, due to processing, the number of processes and the allocation of RAM memory;
- Use of resources – even if the visitation is not high, but if the site to work 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;
- Website resources – the evolution and even the updating of the website, often means installing plugins, changing the programming or even creating an e-commerce or a blog that did not exist before and all this puts more demand on the hosting environment .
Who is unlimited hosting suitable for?
Most of the hosting plans used at HostMídia and in many companies are unlimited plans that lend themselves very well to almost all micro and small companies, professionals and freelancers.
Generally speaking, 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 and small terms. 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 growth, without the need to change plans.
As we mentioned, just a variation, such as a company blog that becomes very successful or an installed plugin that is a processing hog and that reality can change.
What is not allowed to host on unlimited plans?
As in the case of limits, there may be differences according to the hosting, but in general, most restrict the following aspects:
- Use as a virtual disk – it must be borne in mind that this is website hosting and therefore intended to host what is closely related to 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 a self-service fee is not paid for the couple. The service suitable for this purpose is reseller hosting;
- Gaming sites – games can often be resource intensive and are more susceptible to attack;
- Streaming – audio and video streaming services, consume, depending on the number of users, large volumes of bandwidth and traffic;
- Testing – 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. This category includes, and for the same reasons, inactive sites;
- Download sites – sites such as 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.
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