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Yahoo Offers All-You-Can-Eat Storage and Bandwidth
Lucas123 writes "Yahoo this week opened up a new monthly Web Hosting service for small and medium sized businesses that allows unlimited hosted storage capacity and bandwidth for $11.95 a month. Yahoo had been charging $12 a month for 5GB of disk space and 200GB of bandwidth; $20 a month for 10GB disk space and 400GB of bandwidth; and $40 for 20GB disk space and 500GB bandwidth.."
Interesting to see a big company like Yahoo try their hand at the "unlimited" marketing game. Anybody who's had experience in the past with any company who offers "unlimited" knows better- Anybody remember Comcast "unlimited" broadband?
.0001% of their resources. Turns out you can have 500 gb of files, but coincidentally it takes just enough cpu to copy the file that they kick you off. Or some hosting companies go ahead and say it in the TOS- you can't have more than 1% of the alotted bandwidth, other than that it's unlimited!
Bunches of online hosting companies offer "unlimited" services with as much space or bandwidth as you need- and all these companies have a disclaimer in their TOS that explains they can't use more than
Eventually, yes, they get brought down. Law suits, investigations, what have you. They will eventually add their limits to the fine print, just like everybody before them. The catch? Everybody with the host will suffer horrible service up till the day the limit is defined, and after that, it probably won't get much better. That is, if you're not already kicked off their service for using too much of the unlimited service. Anybody not completely disgusted with the service at this point will most likely be offended that their freedom is being taken away and may leave out of protest alone.
You'd think Yahoo would learn better than start a huge marketing campaign on a service they can't possibly keep profitable. Think about it- Yahoo Music Unlimited just closed! It was a nice idea, except it wasn't making them money! This is a huge PR disaster waiting to happen.
Let's just take them up on the offer and get rid of them. Somebody call Google and explain to them there's a new host that will host Google's search engine for $12. We'll see how long Yahoo stays unlimited.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Will this service continue after Yahoo is bought? Is it just something to cause their price to go up before they are bought by claiming more customers?
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
Hey Slashdot admins, are you moving over to Yahoo? I bet that'd cut back on your hosting costs by quite a bit. That'd also be a great test of how truly unlimited it is.
Yahoo's move is the inevitable endgame in an ongoing arms race between major shared hosting firms, who have been super-sizing the disk space and data transfer on their accounts for two years. Here's the larger question: Is this just a marketing gimmick; a bright shiny "UNLIMITED" bauble to dangle in front of small business folk? Or is it an effective way to attract customers from HostGator who find that 1,000 gigs of disk space is simply not enough? Almost nobody needs this, but some might be influenced by it.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
3 months later, an upset Yahoo Exec was overheard saying,
Tis no man, tis a remorseless eating machine.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Not unlimited at all.... they just redefine unlimited.
http://us.rd.yahoo.com/smallbusiness/Lwebhosting/home/bb/*http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/unlimited/
This won't meet the needs of large businesses.
not even remotely.
And these are -explicitly- shared hosting accounts, and there are some restrictions - including how quickly you can grow your disk usage, and if you are using too much bandwidth you'll be flagged. Another is that they explicitly are saying that it's not to be used as a datawarehousing resource.
All things that a large business is going to want to do.
The thing that annoys me about most hosting plans is that they scale up disk space and bandwith together--as if one inevitably follows the other. For example, I have a miniscule website that hosts a ~200 meg game download. So I need a whopping ~300 megs of disk space. But when I get a spike of downloads, I can hit several gigs of bandwith per day. But I would have to purchase additional "disk space" along with bandwidth if I were going with a traditional hosting plan.
Annoying.
expandfairuse.org
Most small business sites will never use even 100gb of data. We offer shared hosting at ~$15/month for 200GB disk, 2tb bandwidth, and of our customers who use it, most could downgrade to cheaper accounts ($8? $4.50?) without a problem**. Yahoo knows this about its own customers, too, so this is likely a gimmick to give the impression of a "deal" while knowing most people won't actually consume much. Also note this quote from Yahoo's unlimited email FAQ: "The purpose of unlimited storage isn't to provide an online storage warehouse. Usage that suggests this approach gets flagged by Yahoo! Business Email's anti-abuse controls." Or, elsewhere in the help system:
OK. What exactly is that speed of growth?
(**Yes, I realize that some Arrow Bay customers are reading this. Check your disk and bandwidth usage: if it's always significantly under what you're paying for, consider downgrading to the next package for your next billing cycle. Seriously.)
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Heh. "Unlimited bandwidth", but if you use "too much" you'll be "flagged". IOW, Yahoo! has just joined the long-tradition of "unlimited" hosting services where "unlimited" means "we won't tell you up front what the limits are, but they sure exist, and you'll sure be nailed for breaking them."
Better off getting an account where the limits are disclosed, and you can pay to get them raised.
Storage space has been a big issue of contention on Dreamhost as well. I signed up for their service, feeling happy that I had 500G of remote storage to use as I pleased. It turned out it wasn't that simple.
Unlimited sounds great, until you start using a large amount of space and Yahoo has to find some reason to say that you're not complying with their terms of service.
Keep in mind that Yahoo can deliver unlimited bandwidth much cheaper than a hosting company can. You have to keep in mind that Yahoo has an expansive network and they are doing settlement-free peering with all of the Tier 1 ISP's, as well as anyone else who happens to be hooked up to a common peering point. Hell, even at our regional hosting center we're connected to a peering point and we peer directly with Yahoo, bypassing the Internet.
The point is that all that bandwidth doesn't cost Yahoo nearly as much as a traditional hosting provider would have to pay for it.
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This is not a good example, since dial-up usage doesn't scale very much. You only have 24 hours/day, and your bandwidth is no more than 56k.
So, you see, if your average user stays connected 3 hours/day, the heavy user will only use 8x time amount. Now, if you consider broadband and your average users transfer 2GB/month, a heavy user will easily transfer 400GB/month. Thats 200 times more. And according to a quick calculation here (could be wrong), it is theoretically possible for a user to use 1.3TB/month on a 4Mbps connection (note: actually bandwidth usage, including protocol overhead etc).
If you consider webhosting, things get even worst. An average user will store 500MB, and transfer 2GB/month (if that). While a heavy user can easily reach 500GB and transfer 2TB/month. In both cases, 1000 times more (or 1024, if you like).
Unlimited can easily become a real nightmare.
morcego