Unlimited Bandwidth and Disk Space – Do I Need It?
Unlimited bandwidth and disk space looks very attractive in the marketing materials, but do you really need it? The short answer, probably not. Besides, there is no such thing as “unlimited disk space” or “unlimited bandwidth”. That would be akin to turning on a faucet and letting it run. Web hosting doesn’t work like that.
A web server is a physical machine with a finite set of resources. It’s a computer with limited hard disk space, limited processor capabilities, and a limited amount of memory. On a shared hosting account, a web server is not hosting only your website, it also hosts hundreds of other websites. Those limited server resources are shared between all websites hosted on the server.
Here is a screen capture from one of my web hosting accounts. I have unlimited disk space and bandwidth on it. (That’s what the little infinity sign means.) The account has 36 live domains on it, 32 of them being WordPress blogs. According to that picture, I’m using 1191 MB of space and 2537 MB of data transfer.
Disk Space
Back in the day, hosting accounts were metered and sold in increments of disk space. Plan sizes got larger over the years as hard drives became bigger and cheaper. But one thing always remained the same, web hosting companies saw that most people only used a tiny portion of the space allocated. So just like the airlines overbook a flight because they know a percentage of people won’t show up, web hosting companies oversell the server because they know over 90% of the account holders aren’t going to use their allocated space.
Then around 2007 or so we started seeing hosting plans with unlimited disk space and bandwidth and still the hosting companies oversold the servers. Without having that clear ”line in the sand” with regards to space and bandwidth on metered accounts, some hosts got creative by saying you can’t exceed a certain percentage of available resources or you account will be suspended. However, they don’t tell you how much space, memory and bandwidth the server is configured for, much less what happens to be available at the time. In other words, in order to oversell and make thousands of dollars in profit, they have to put some rules in place to protect themselves so they can continue overselling and making thousands. Stay away from those types of hosts.
Bandwidth
In the communcations world, bandwidth is the speed at which data travels measured in bits/second. In web hosting speak, “bandwidth” is the amount of data moving to and from your server. All those web pages, images, video, etc. are bits and bytes flowing up and down the line and they are measured. More accurately, it’s the amount of data transferred to and from your server. The more bandwidth data transfer a web host is willing to give you, the better.
Why do hosts offer more than the typical customer needs?
To create the perception of value to sell more web hosting packages. Is this bad? Not really, it keeps the market competitive and drives down costs for customers. However it also tends to make hosts that don’t participate in this marketing technique appear like they aren’t providing adequate resources.
The better strategy would be to first determine your site’s space and data transfer requirements and find a hosting deal that accommodates that amount, plus a little extra for future growth. Then you can concentrate on factors such as reputation, service and features.
What about the other “unlimited” features?
Those are much more meaningful. Let’s take a look.
Unlimited Domains - It might also say unlimited websites or unlimited addon domains. It’s all the same. This is how many domains you can host on your account. If you’re an internet marketer or want separate personal and business sites, you need to be able to host more than one domain on an account without having to pay extra. Unlimited domains is good.
Unlimited Databases – Many applications like blogs and CMS platforms install MySQL databases. If you want to host multiple blogs, you’ll need multiple databases. WordPress is replacing standard HTML websites because it’s so easy to maintain and change themes. I’ve pretty much stopped building old school HTML sites and I’m now using WordPress. It’s also fun to design your own WordPress themes. So if you’re going to be installing a lot of blogs, unlimited database is good.
Unlimited POP3 Email Accounts- I stopped using my ISP email accounts eons ago for the simple fact that every time I changed my ISP, there went my email address. I got tired of starting my life over so I now only use POP3 email accounts from my own domains. You’ll want to always keep personal and business email separate and if you run some type of business, you may need multiple business email accounts for support, billing, payments, etc. Also, if you’re going to host multiple domains on your account, you’ll probably want to set up at least one email account per domain for contact purposes. So depending upon how many domains you plan on having, unlimited email accounts is good.
Unlimited Sub-Domains- Sub-domains are like a domain on a domain. For example, if your website is www.ClownMakeupOnly.com, you can set up a sub-domain on that domain to handle support tickets called support.ClownMakeupOnly.com. That support sub-domain can now be treated as an entirely different domain. Sub-domains may be something you’ll never even use. Quite frankly, I think unlimited sub-domains may be overkill, so unless you have a specific need for creating a lot of them, don’t even worry about it.
Unlimited Email Forwarders – You can set up an email address to forward to another email address. This is useful if you have many websites all with their own email addresses, but you want to collectively funnel mail from them to be sent to one email address. It’s another one of those features you may never use. Unlimited email forwarders is overkill.
Unlimited Email Auto-Responders- These are NOT follow-up auto-responders like aWeber or GetResponse. This is nothing more than a simple email address that sends back a one-time reply message. Unlimited email auto-responders are overkill.
Unlimited Parked Domains – I can think of no useful purpose for this feature. A parked domain is nothing more than a domain name that is undeveloped. If you own a .com name and also register its .net and .org version, you can park those extra domains on your account and point them to your .com name. However, you can do that very same thing at the domain name registrar (the place where you bought the name) without having to change the DNS server entries in order to park it at your host.
Unlimited FTP Accounts- If you’re the only one FTP’ing, you only need one. If you have some type of setup where you allow others to upload stuff to your sites, you’ll want to set up FTP accounts soley for that purpose so they don’t have access to your files. You’ll probably never use this. A lot of them may be good if you use them, but mostly, unlimited FTP accounts are overkill.
