Hosting Data-Transfer Quotas Are Fading Out

miller60 writes "One of the largest Web hosts has scrapped data transfer quotas on all its shared hosting plans, retiring one of the oldest metrics in the hosting industry. With its latest move, 1&1 Internet has gone all-in on 'unlimited' hosting, a controversial practice viewed by many as a gimmick that promises more than it can deliver. Yahoo and Go Daddy have also experimented with unlimited plans, as the shared hosting sector responds to a tough economy, tough competition, and predictions that it will be made obsolete by cloud computing."

Comments

SLA

[oldhack]

I'd guess the lack of SLA renders it meaningless.

Re:SLA

[phoebe]

It should be apparent that quotas have been scrapped as they cannot actually guarantee you can use the bandwidth speed they sold. So when they could have previously sold 1/5/10/50GB/day tiers, they spin that into a flat up to 50GB/day, let's call it unlimited, p.s. you'll be lucky to see 1GB.

Re:SLA

[siloko]

That's it - I run my own 'bedroom' server from consumer broadband which is ok for tinkering and trying out new things. A colleague did the same but got pissed with the slow download rates so leased a server from a commercial company. Nowhere did our discussions on the issue mention download caps as a problem, only speed. Speed, in case you missed it, is the new black!

Re:SLA

[drspliff]

However many other hosting companies can quite easily handle large amounts of bandwidth.

One of my hosts is HostGator, they're not really the best out there, but they seem to be able to handle large traffic sites very well. One site of mine has been averaging about 7 or 8mbit, peaking at 20-30mbit. Last month we transferred just 5tb of data across all the sites hosted on the same account, with one site taking 11 million hits.

Sure, we use more resources than most customers, but at the same time we're on a $14 a month "Business" plan which is advertised as Unlimited across the board. I don't see us getting kicked off until we're using perhaps twice as much as now, even then... they'd probably put us on a Reseller plan at twice the price so it's no big deal.

Re:SLA

[Anonymous Coward]

Being a former employee of one of these major hosters, I'll tell you how it worked for us with this unlimited thing. We ran a number of clusters that hosted around half a million websites.

You can have "unlimited", we won't cut you off purely on usage. We will cut you off if we notice that you're causing problems for the whole system. We're not going to grow our cluster significantly just for you. So yes, you could happily do 5-10mpbs/s for the entire month. If you spiked to something like 100mbps for any length of time, it would be noticeable.

Its a shared system. Shared hosting means shared resources. The point where you start impacting other customers by consuming too many resources, you'll get throttled or suspended. Same goes for excessive CPU or memory usage, abusive database monopolization, or other such crap.

Of course, we'll probably notice you once you're in the top 20 sites on our platform, but if you're not actually causing problems, you'll be fine. In short, if you make the senior admins do work, you're probably liable to get suspended.

Re:SLA

[MindStalker]

One interesting factor that many ignore is that big hosting companies like HostGator, host so many sites that their peak loads are based upon general internet peak loads. Unless you have a HUGE audience most likely your specific site getting hit frequently possibly means another popular site is getting hit less often. Lets say that on average at 8pm/EST (a typical peak time) 2% (a random guess on my part) of people surfing the internet in the US are viewing a HostGator site. That metric is not going to change from day to day much at all, even if one specific site is getting slash-dotted.

Re:SLA

[iamhassi]

"It should be apparent that quotas have been scrapped as they cannot actually guarantee you can use the bandwidth speed they sold."

Not only that, but they've been offering "unlimited" bandwidth for at least 10 years, why is this news now? Quick google search reveals hundreds of sites offering "unlimited bandwidth". There's even a website from 2003 that explains what "unlimited bandwidth" really means, which is basically it's unlimited until we notice you and decide to cancel service because our TOS allows us the right to refuse service for any reason.

This sounds more like a press release. I've always stayed away from the "unlimited bandwidth" hosts because it's fake: "If hosting companies truly offered UNLIMITED bandwidth and hard disk space, why wouldn't Google just say, "You know what? Why have our own hosting data centers when we can get UNLIMITED bandwidth and hard disk space for $4.95 a month? We can't lose." It's really a very silly concept."

GoDaddy is an amusing name

[syousef]

Why not GoMummy or GoBaby? All I know about this company is that I've seen people complain and that some of their ads are risque, but I still chuckle every time I see the name. "GoDaddy unlimited hosting" sounds like an all night party for old bong smoking pot bellied losers.

Re:GoDaddy is an amusing name

[zmollusc]

Hey! I resemble that remark!

Re:GoDaddy is an amusing name

[TapeCutter]

"sounds like an all night party for old bong smoking pot bellied losers."

No, no all night parties, but shooing stray kids off the lawn can get a bit noisy.

Re:GoDaddy is an amusing name

[harlows_monkeys]

According to Wikipedia, they were looking for something more memorable than Jomax Technologies. Someone suggested Big Daddy, but that was taken, and then someone just came up with Go Daddy.

Re:GoDaddy is an amusing name

[svtdragon]

Really? They came up with Go Daddy out of Jomax? The tragedy here is that the original name was ripe for a JoMama joke. "JoMama's pipe is so fat..." "JoMama's not like a truck... she's more like a series of tubes that [censored]." Help me out here, /. There have to be some I'm missing.

Re:GoDaddy is an amusing name

[jpyeck]

I'm surprised they didn't make the shorter leap from Jomax --> Jo Mama

Imagine the fun commercials they could have made with that name!

Re:GoDaddy is an amusing name

[metaforest]

I have been using their services for two years without so much as even a minor glitch. They host my domains and a vLAMP server the domains are pointed at. My service is not unlimited. I get up to 150GB of storage, and 15GB of traffic per month. I've never even come close to either cap, even hosting a few large videos for limited access to friends and family. I use it as my personal playground in The Cloud..... So far it's been much easier to manage than a 'bedroom' server. I do also maintain a local server swinging moderately big iron: it's also configured as a headless Ubuntu LAMP.

YMMV

Re:GoDaddy is an amusing name

[syousef]

No, no all night parties, but shooing stray kids off the lawn can get a bit noisy.

At first I misread that as shooting!

Re:GoDaddy is an amusing name

[TapeCutter]

Hmmmmmm, that gives me an idea...

What is cloud computing if not hosted servers?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Typical cloud services are metered at higher rates than typical standard hosting services. The difference is that you get metered on actual usage than arbitrarily-defined usage levels.

It isn't really different than inversely calculating the ROI of a pedometer. The more you walk and use it, the less it costs per measured step. However, if you buy it and put it on the shelf, you have that initial sunk cost and barely any return on your investment.

Clouds are cheap if you have few visitors. They are outrageously expensive if you have massive amounts of traffic.

Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers?

[gravos]

My perception has been that the cloud services (Amazon, Google, slicehost, mosso, etc) have realistic, sustainable per-unit costs whereas shared hosting outfits tend to have completely unrealistic cost assessments. They count on the fact that most people won't use their full quota because there's no way they could deliver what they promise to every user without ending up WAY in the red.

For my money, I'll stick with cloud services that are metered honestly and transparently.

Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers?

[BikeHelmet]

My perception has been that the cloud services (Amazon, Google, slicehost, mosso, etc) have realistic, sustainable per-unit costs whereas shared hosting outfits tend to have completely unrealistic cost assessments. They count on the fact that most people won't use their full quota because there's no way they could deliver what they promise to every user without ending up WAY in the red.

FYI, everyone does this.

Your ISP, your phone carrier, probably your electrical and water company... even some software developers. They have very high upkeep costs, and very low costs for actually keeping you connected. The hope is you'll be one of the users that helps pay their upkeep, rather than actually using their service.

Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers?

[TapeCutter]

"They count on the fact that most people won't use their full quota because there's no way they could deliver what they promise to every user without ending up WAY in the red."

Meh, banks do the same thing with your deposits.

Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers?

[sopssa]

The fact is that unlimited is easy and more convenient than trying to calculate if the limits are enough. And these are $3 hosting packages, you can be pretty sure that you wont be allowed to host lets say YouTube on it. It's not just the bandwidth, but all the server resources it would consume.

Same thing with dedicated servers on providers that dont have quota. It doesn't mean you're now on a 10gbit line and you can use it as you please. Instead of quotas, your bandwidth is 100mbit and usually on a shared line. You can usually burst it up to 100mbit, but if others need more bandwidth it will be shared. Dedicated bandwidth costs ~10x more and isn't usually needed anyway, as long as they dont *really* oversell the line too much.

With everything its about bringing down the costs for users by sharing the expensive resources. It works good most of the time. If you know it wont work for you, then you can get the more expensive dedicated bandwidth and so on.

It's just one inconvenience out of the way.

Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rule 1: Never use 1and1 or as it's know in germanny 1und1. They are the shittiest company ever. They impose all sorts of rules and will ban/delete your account without notice. I have had an entire domain and mail deleted from the system. All they would say was "You requested it, there is no restore function. Sorry you are no longer a client". The request was to move the domain name, and the contract was cancelled 3months in advance of the end date as required. F*ck 1 and 1!

Rule 2: No free lunch. Goes the same for bandwidth, the unlimited plans are for those with small websites that do not distribute audio/video or pictures files. Anything that takes bandwidth is not allowed. Some will try and keep service up if there is a Digg/Slashdot/Reddit run on the pages, but most will just drop the route to save bandwidth. I asked one of these companies about it, we do 3000GB/month, Tech support even said there is no way they would allow that amount of data on a $20/month plan. We have to get our own server. Good news is now there are $99/month hosting plans that give you 4000GB/month.

Rule 3: Amazon EC2 and S3 is not cheap. It's cheaper to get a $99 server and use that, though it's not redundant, you get what you pay for.

Rule 4: Keep moving hosting companies. It's better to change plans and locations to get better deals. Bandwidth prices drop all the time. There is always someone hungry for new busines, so why keep paying 2004 prices cause you are too lazy to move that server. Rsync is your friend.

Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers?

[jedrek]

The truth is, almost all users will use much less than their quota. I've run, in the past and present, a bunch of personal sites of varying popularity: a web design portal, an e-card site, a blog, etc. They got from hundreds to tens of thousands of uniques/day. Even on the busiest months, I my bandwidth use was calculated in GB or tens of GB. Baring traffic anomalies, like the slashdoting my dropbox.com account got a couple days ago, you need either extremely heavy content (video) or to be hugely popular to get past 100GB/month. I doubt if 0.5% of dreamhost or 1&1 accounts do that kind of traffic.

Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers?

[Anonymous Coward]

The company I work for, www.cari.net offers all three services, Shared Hosting, Dedicated Servers and Cloud clusters. We measure bandwidth at the switch port and use Average bandwidth not 95th Percentile. Sure, we calculate ROI and look to make a profit, like any business, but we do work with the clients and not cut them off at some arbitrary level.

Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers?

[gravyface]

Slightly off-topic, but we promptly cancelled our Mosso hosting once we found out that their "cloud" (whatever) MySQL servers were set to listen on the default port, accepting root logins from *any* IP address: they're claim was that this enabled users to use whatever SQL tools they wanted remotely (umm, ssh tunneling ftw?). I guess those "tools" also include brute force password attacking utilities and the like?

Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers?

[HeronBlademaster]

They count on the fact that most people won't use their full quota because there's no way they could deliver what they promise to every user without ending up WAY in the red.

Not only that, but shared hosts put limits on customer accounts that they don't tell customers about.

For example, 1&1 puts a limit of 12 apache processes on each shared hosting account. What does that mean? It means if you have a PHP website, and 13 people connect to any domain on the account within the same second, at least one of them will get a 500 server error.

That might not seem so bad, but if something breaks and PHP processes start freezing up, then apache will spawn new processes to serve new visitors, and if those freeze up, your entire site goes down for apparently no reason - and since they don't tell you about the limit, and the first-tier tech support people don't check for it, you're going to waste hours on the phone with them until finally one of the second or third level techs says "we need your FTP password to check on things and oh by the way you're hitting your process limit". (Yes, they actually asked me for my username and password to their own system.)

It was this same incident that proved that when 1&1 techs say "I'm having the system reboot the server" they're flat-out lying.

I wrote a lengthy blog post about why I left 1&1, if anyone's really bored.

Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers?

[HeronBlademaster]

Rule 1: Never use 1and1 or as it's know in germanny 1und1. They are the shittiest company ever.

Seconded.

Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers?

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is also that it only takes one user to saturate the pipe and all but disable traffic for everyone else on the server behind that pipe. At the university where I work, we may not have bandwidth caps, but we also can and will throttle usage to prevent this kind of problem.

Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers?

[CastrTroy]

What's the difference between having the MySQL server accepting connections from everywhere, and having the SSH Server accepting connections from everywhere? I really don't see much of a difference. Now, they should probably have some kind of safe guard in place to stop people from brute forcing either one, but the existence of an open SQL server by itself doesn't seem all that bad, considering most hosting providers already have SSH open anyway.

Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds remarkably like health care.

On the flip side

[DaMattster]

It used to be that the only reason you would go to a hosting provider was because the cost of the bandwidth and hardware to do it yourself was prohibitive. Now with providers rolling out Fibre To The Home and Fibre To The Neighborhood and the availability of commodity components, it becomes affordable to do it yourself. It is also preferrable because more of the control is put into your hands. As Google's outtage hopefully demonstrated, cloud computing is risky and it is better to depend on as few contract resources as possible. I believe 1&1's marketing analysts are foreseeing this as the potential end to needing a hosting company and need to make their offers more competitive. Certainly, this offer is very competitive but 1&1 has had a shaky history of reliability. A quick search will show you the number of dissatisfied customers and it is frightening.

Re:On the flip side

[timmarhy]

what if mom unplugs your server to give your basement it's annual vacuum? there are elements of a professionally run datacenter that can't be reproduced at home for the same cost.

if your worried about losing data, buy a slot in a colocation facility so it's your hardware everything is sitting on and you can encrypt the drive and put tamper alarms on it

Re:On the flip side

[Rakishi]

As Google's outtage hopefully demonstrated, cloud computing is risky and it is better to depend on as few contract resources as possible.

No, all it indicates is that a lot of people are idiots who overreact to whatever hype the media is currently blabbering about. It's why you get 60 hour waiting times in every ER when the media says that some horrible new disease has just killed 15 people in the past two months.

The rest are well aware that any locally hosted service will have an even worse reliability than google or cost so much it's not worth it for most people.

Re:On the flip side

[TapeCutter]

"what if mom unplugs your server to give your basement it's annual vacuum?"

Who cares about a power blip? - I would love mum to come over and shovel the crap off the carpet but she keeps giving me all this shit about how being 80 means she's too old to push a wheelbarrow.

Re:On the flip side

[petermgreen]

The big thing that a properly run datacenter gives you is highly reliable power, network links and cooling (granted the last one may not be an issue if it's just the odd box and your local climate isn't too hot).

FTTH will give you more bandwidth (though not nessacerally much more) to your communication providers most local node but that is all it's likely to get you. It's still likely to both be badly congested and not particulally reliable/quickly fixed.

Re:On the flip side

[evilviper]

Now with providers rolling out Fibre To The Home and Fibre To The Neighborhood and the availability of commodity components, it becomes affordable to do it yourself. It is also preferrable because more of the control is put into your hands.

Yes, and when that Fiber goes out for a week, you'll have plenty of opportunity to revel in just how much "control" you have.

Good luck getting you ISP to allow BGP updates, for multihoming.

And your UPSes and generators are in good shape, right?

How much is unlimited?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems the word unlimited never actually means unlimited when internet services are involved. My "unlimited" internet on my mobile phone contract is actually 500MB. Everything is "Unlimited" is Capped or has a Fair Use Policy.
If I ever see the word Unlimited when advertising a service, I dismiss it out of hand and look for the small print.
I understand that an "unlimited" service is practically impossible to provide- I just ask the service providers don't use the word. Tell me the actual amount and then I don't have to read the terms and conditions of every offer to compare products.

Re:How much is unlimited?

[Anonymous Coward]

The first thing I do when comparing companies is check for GNU/Linux, ensure no MS Windows hosting is available, and then make sure it has a clear set cost for bandwidth- and now I also make sure to get virtual private server hosting account. Everybody else is behind the times and bound to be out to screw you since it is just a job to them.

Re:How much is unlimited?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlimited means that there is no artificial limit. The natural limit, which is bandwidth*time, still exists, obviously. Many hosting packages already offer more transfer volume than the server can realistically deliver, so advertising them as unlimited gives the user no additional transfer volume, but it removes the uncertainty whether an onslaught of traffic might cost more. This increases the (perceived) value of the product without any technical upgrade.

The thing is, network bandwidth isn't the scarce resource in hosting anymore. With the exception of download services, web sites are limited by processing power and hard disk seek times, because web site authors use fancy content management systems nowadays. I once served 30GB of small files in one day with a $1 shared hosting account (unlimited transfer volume). No signs of overload, but of course that was an entirely static site. The same traffic would have crushed a typical dynamic CMS site.

Re:How much is unlimited?

[AmiMoJo]

It's the usual "fair use" policy, i.e. unlimited until we think it's too much.

More interesting to know would be what happens if you exceed their unstated limit. Is your site just cut off, or maybe bandwidth/cpu limited? If you decide to leave because you hit the limit, do you get a refund on the remaining contract period and do you have to pay any sort of cancellation fee?

Re:How much is unlimited?

[HeronBlademaster]

If I ever see the word Unlimited when advertising a service, I dismiss it out of hand and look for the small print.

While I agree with you in principle, I feel I should mention the one service I've seen that effectively does provide what it promises:

Unlimited text messaging plans from AT&T are true to their word. If there's a hidden limit on that, it's set higher than any sane person could possibly use. (My sister's first month with unlimited texting racked up something like 6,000 text messages, and that's on top of what the other four of us on the plan were using. AT&T never complained, so they must not care.)

Re:How much is unlimited?

[HeronBlademaster]

Unlimited means that there is no artificial limit. The natural limit, which is bandwidth*time, still exists, obviously.

The problem isn't that there's a natural limit, the problem is that a lot of companies use "unlimited" when in fact the limit is artificial, not natural.

Wasn't it just last year that Comcast finally admitted that their "unlimited" cable internet service (i.e. no transfer cap) was actually capped at 200GB/month?

Two years ago it was a Comcast sales guy who told me "there's no limit, but if you use too much we cut you off." He wouldn't answer the question "how much is too much?" except to repeat himself.

Re:How much is unlimited?

[Anonymous Coward]

first month with unlimited texting racked up something like 6,000 text messages

(Realized that this gets kinda rant-like later on)

Lets be look at this: If a message is 150 bytes (I think that is the normal max SMS message length(OK, wiki says depending on 7bit, 8bit or 16bit(UTF-16) it can be 160, 140 or 70 chars, so 150 it a good average)), 6000 messages is under 1MB of data. Once you add the headers and stuff, lets say 5 MB. (Grossly overestimating as this would suggest the headers are 4x as long as the messages)

How much bandwidth does talking cost? Lets say 6.5Kbit/sec (half-rate, 13 Kb/sec is full), actually lets say 8Kbit/sec just for a wrapper and stuff.(and easy math now, since 8Kb = 1KB) That much texting would be the same as (5MB/1KB/sec (remember bytes vs bits here) around 5000 seconds, or around 83 minutes.

Now, you said it was unlimited, but what if it had to be paid for?
Data rates? $0.01/KB(at least back in Jan thats what it was) would be (using above) around $50. If you were paying current prices ($0.20 in, $0.20 out) that would be around $1200. (This is where I think I got rant-like, the fact that they charge so much for a text message)

Plus talking is needing to be real-time, whereas texting could have delays. And they(most cell providers in the US at least seem to) have free mobile-to-mobile voice calls in their network for years(at least 8, maybe more, I've only had AT&T/Cingular/AT&T since Winter 2001).

Re:How much is unlimited?

[HeronBlademaster]

Actually texting doesn't cost the cell company anything at all, since texts are sent in (previously) unused space in the command channels (i.e. when the cell phone updates its location with the tower, it'll send a text if it has one to send). Since these updates happen anyway, they're essentially free for the carriers.

Yes, I agree that the standalone text messaging rates are ridiculous. I'll even add that the charge for the unlimited texting package is ridiculously high ($30 which covers all five lines). Ideally, they should be free (or at least included with the base plan), since they're essentially free for the carriers.

I'm just saying that they advertise "unlimited texting", and they give you unlimited texting (up to the natural limit where you can't actually type that fast).

oops

[Anonymous Coward]

companies like godaddy claim unlimited but they will cut you off if you use "too much"

It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of hosting providers in Finland have always been offering best effort bandwidth.

My experiance with "no data transfer quotas"

[HughsOnFirst]

Last year I had a website that was number one on digg for months and eventually got over ten thousand diggs

http://digg.com/people/He_Took_a_Polaroid_Every_Day_Until_the_Day_He_Died

My unlimited , "no data transfer quotas" account didn't last a whole hour.

Figure that each visitor accounted for 13,000 hits and 6,000+ largish photos it added up

Re:My experiance with "no data transfer quotas"

[Anonymous Coward]

each visitor accounted for 13,000 hits and 6,000+ largish photos

Your server's failure was due to bad web design. No server could have handled that, regardless of the kind of uplink. Unlimited transfer volume does not also mean unlimited CPU power, unlimited RAM and unlimited hard disk bandwidth.

Re:My experiance with "no data transfer quotas"

[pHus10n]

Are you trying to crash your server again out of spite or something? :)

Re:My experiance with "no data transfer quotas"

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS.

Also, why in GODS name did you post this thing on SLASHDOT?!
Say bye to your site again in 3...2...1...

Re:My experiance with "no data transfer quotas"

[ukyoCE]

Did they block you from transferring data, or did your server run out of processing power?

Or did you somehow think bandwidth was the same thing as the other server performance metrics?

Re:My experiance with "no data transfer quotas"

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, why in GODS name did you post this thing on SLASHDOT?!

Because he is a troll, and his post is just a poorly disguised attempt at getting more users to click on his dumb link.

Re:My experiance with "no data transfer quotas"

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they block you from transferring data, or did your server run out of processing power?

Or did you somehow think bandwidth was the same thing as the other server performance metrics?

Typically when the hosting provider redirects all pages in your domain to one with only the message "This account has exceeded it's bandwidth limits. If you are the site owner, please contact us." then one tends to think it is a transfer quota issue.

Or did you somehow think "transfer quota reached" means the other server performance metrics have reached their limits?

Re:My experiance with "no data transfer quotas"

[ukyoCE]

If you're actually the OP (which I'm doubting due to AC), that's a pretty important detail to mention in your claim. If the server survived and gave a "Quota Reached" message, that's a very specific failure case at odds with a "no quotas" claim.

In the OP it was just stated "my account didn't last". That's awfully vague and could be for any number of reasons other than bandwidth.

Re:My experiance with "no data transfer quotas"

[HughsOnFirst]

Are you trying to crash your server again out of spite or something? :)

It's not like I put the url into the post, and if you want to go to trouble of finding the site that's fine. According to google there are "about 14,200" mentions of it on various web pages with about five thousand blogs linking to it.

The New York Times, Canadian public broadcasting, The Guardian in the UK, a bunch of other newspapers in Scotland, Italy, a business magazine in Denmark, Time Magazine, Fox News, Wikipedia, and a zillion photography related sites all link to it

At this point I'm not too worried about the Slashdot effect. ...and this is *really* weird, I show up in a standardized reading comprehension test in Spain
http://www.pnte.cfnavarra.es/eoip/castellano/depart/exam_av_in.pdf
WTF??? I just noticed that

I moved the 13 thousand images to a image hosting account that lives on amazon s3 and went from about 6800 html files to 20 files, so the transaction load is a lot smaller even if total size of the html files is about the same.

Actually, I like the version I put on gigapan better than my site, so go slashdot that
http://gigapan.org/viewProfile.php?userid=5135

Re:My experiance with "no data transfer quotas"

[HughsOnFirst]

Hi there, OP here

Yes it was a badly written site generated with a shell script intended for about 8 people to see so we could talk about an art exhibition buried in a bunch of test sites for clients, and yes I was so far over the transaction limit that they even turned the logging software off. I learned about it in about an hour when a client called me on the phone wondering what happened to his test page
The hosting company , Host Monster , was very reasonable about the whole thing and I only have good things to say about their customer service, especialy compared to some much more expensive hosting services that some of my clients
To clarify, I still use quite a bit of bandwidth, it was the transactions that killed me.

My point in the original post was that it was not the bandwidth that is the problem but the cpu time so unlimited bandwidth doesn't mean that much
If I had gotten around to making the whole thing a drupal site like I was planing instead of a bunch of flat html pages I'm sure it would have been worse.

Re:My experiance with "no data transfer quotas"

[HughsOnFirst]

That's not a link to my site, it's a link to a digg story that links to another site that in turn links to a site that has a link to my site.

If you are too lazy to find my site I really don't care if you can find it, on the other hand you are actually interested and take the effort find it, fine.

Anyway I think you meant spammer, not troll. Trolls are generally anonymous posters of unfounded or ignorant (did you click the link?) claims and general snarkiness.

I filter both out of my blog, and no I'm not linking to that here either.

Always been on 95th percentile

[Nicolas MONNET]

No transfer quota.
For instance I have a few low usage servers (mail and backups for a few small biz), I pay for 2Mbps with 100M burst. This means that I can use 100M 5% of the time as long as I don't use more than 2M 95% of the time.
But bandwidth is extremely cheap around here.

Re:Always been on 95th percentile

[Opportunist]

Would you please also tell us where we have to move to instead of just dangling that carrot?

Re:Always been on 95th percentile

[Anonymous Coward]

For instance I have a few low usage servers

Would you please also tell us where we have to move to instead of just dangling that carrot?

Into a datacenter?

Re:Always been on 95th percentile

[notmyusualnickname]

Well, he has a French sounding name, an email address from altiva.fr, his sig has a URL in French with the French TLD...

Re:Always been on 95th percentile

[Opportunist]

Let's see... tons of computers whirring softly to soothe you to sleep, industrial strenngth air condition, no windows or other sources of natural light, industrial strength UPSs...

When can I move in?

Re:Always been on 95th percentile

[Anonymous Coward]

So.. Canada?

Re:Always been on 95th percentile

[multipartmixed]

95th percentile has been a standard way of billing business-class hosting for at least the last decade, AFAICT.

The big change around here is that overage charges and base bandwidth charges are going down and getting replaced with electricity costs. I'm paying a bloody buck a VA, making my bandwidth bill almost irrelevant.

Of course, I'm not dealing with your mickey-mouse $30 virtual server hosting plans; I have a 100% power and 'net SLA, ~40 peers, 24x7 competent staff, physical security, dual/redundant power infrastructure all the way from generators to the cabinets, etc.

Unlimited?

[iLogiK]

There's no such thing as unlimited.
There is a limit, they just don't tell you what it is. At some point, you'll get an email telling you you're using too much resources.
Also, providers that have unlimited storage have conditions that you can't upload anything you want (uploading large files to share with people for example)

I'm paying $10 a month for a VPS and I'm getting 20GB of storage and 500GB bandwidth a month. I'm using maybe 2GB which is the OS, a few sites, and some pictures and movies of a trip, my girlfriend uploaded to send them to me.
20GB is more than enough, and I can upload anything I want.

I prefer knowing the limit that having it sneaking up on me.

Lies, damn lies, and repeated lies!

[Hurricane78]

We hosted a counterstrike mirror in 2000, and we had an 1&1 "unlimited traffic" plan.

Guess what. After some more GB of traffic as usual went trough the line with a new update of CS, 1&1 closed the connection.

Well, they not simply closed the server connection. It was CeBit some days later, and we were there at the 1&1 stand. The admin, responsible for that very server (among others) also was there. So we asked him, what happend to our unlimited connection. He apologized and tried to re-open the line.
Only to find, that he himself could not connect to the server at all. As if it was blocked at a invisible device in-between.

We could not resolve the issue there, and we later ended the contract.

So don't believe their deliberate lies! There never will be!
There are only managers who calculate an average without thinking, when looking at their statistics of traffic up to now (with the limits).
And later, managers in panic, who notice that people actually will use that unlimited line, when they have it!

Re:Lies, damn lies, and repeated lies!

[Opportunist]

Well, give 'em the benefit of doubt, they might just have been too clueless to figure out what congested the network... It's 1&1 after all...

But yes, it's amazing what companies sell and how angry they get when you actually want to use what you pay for. I have no problem with an offer that says "20 Gig a month and then we cut your wire". Or "10 Gig". Or whatever arbitrary number. But claiming "unlimited" and then strangely resulting in funky problems that for some reason can't be solved is simply dishonest.

Our catchphrase for this is "fair use". You have an unlimited plan, "fair use". When asked what "fair use" is supposed to mean, you get to hear that you "should not have a negative impact on other users' experience". What's meant is that you should not use so much of the shared bandwidth that you limit another user's use of his. Now how the hell should I know whether I do? I mean, before I get a letter telling me that I broke the "fair use" contract.

How I could possible impact other users? Because it's the telco's way of reusing their cables to transport data. Yes, one shared cable for all users. Take a wild guess what having a "2mbit" line actually means during primetime...

Re:Lies, damn lies, and repeated lies!

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. There is no such thing as an unlimited plan (internet connection, hosting, etc.). Unlimited always means "as long as you do not use more than what we define as the average". As soon as you use more than the arbitrary "average", they'll terminate your contract.

I'm surprised they are allowed to do that in so many countries that otherwise have far-reaching consumer protection laws. Then again, lawmakers are always several decades behind times.

It's a good way to tell how trustworthy a company is. If they say unlimited, just ignore them. I'll stay with my fixed 600GB month limit any day before switching to some "unlimited" liar.

Re:Lies, damn lies, and repeated lies!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have more information about this incident? You said they "closed the connection", but from what you said it sounds like the server may have just crashed or shut down.

"The admin could not connect as if there was an invisible device in-between"?

It's OK if you're not very technically inclined. But it sounds like you didn't take even basic measures to investigate the loss of access to your server.

Did you even call tech support, or just talk to a random guy at a booth? That's hardly the place to get proper tech support - if the server is inaccessible over the network, the next step is usually to hook a console up and figure out why.

Re:Lies, damn lies, and repeated lies!

[bill_mcgonigle]

"The admin could not connect as if there was an invisible device in-between"?

It's OK if you're not very technically inclined. But it sounds like you didn't take even basic measures to investigate the loss of access to your server.

Their management units get wedged preventing sercon access, remote reboot, etc. I had a server with them until this happened. My main website was down almost 5 days until they found somebody with a clue to reboot it. I was on the phone with the Phillipines for over 20 hours with this incident, mostly telling script-readers that somebody needed to reset the unit. I cancelled the account and they continued to bill me and sent my account to collections. There's noone in billing to talk to and the only published number is some guy's cell phone in Pittsburg who doesn't return messages. At least as of when I went colo with my own hardware.

Beware of offers that are too good to be true. Funny, I've heard that somewhere before.

Re:Lies, damn lies, and repeated lies!

[Eil]

Yep, there's a difference between "unlimited" and "Internet unlimited". See every other Slashdot article about Comcast over the past decade.

Re:Lies, damn lies, and repeated lies!

[ista]

Okay, let's recap the situation.

You said you've been using your 1&1 webspace for hosting a counterstrike mirror back in Germany during CeBIT 2000.

CeBIT 2000 took place in the end of february, so lets think about spring of 2000 back in Germany.

• Back than, it has been quite hard to get anyone with decent admin knowledge on the job market, as the internet hype has just been in its hot time. So I'd expect any company to let their techs do some real work instead of hanging around at some trade fair booth, sipping coffee and chatting with some people passing by. I guess you've been talking either to sales or someone from the user helpdesk.
• Back than, broadband was not really wide-spread in Germany - the very first lines DSL-were installed in the summer of 1999 in very few selected cities. Cable was not available at all in Germany and about everyone who hasn't been working at a university and didn't have a 2 mbit leased line in their company was connecting to the net via ISDN or modem. According to Wikipedia, only 2900 DSL lines were installed in Germany in back 1999.
• ISDN was somehow spread, but access was billed per b-channel, so most users would only connect to their ISP at 64 kbit/s.
  Most users were using simple modems, connecting to their ISP at something around 40-52 kbit downstream (depending on line quality). So for most users, it took around 2-3 minutes per MB of download.
• HTTP 1.1 (which enables pipelining and partitial downloads) was published in June of 1999. For "download sites" and "mirrors", you were expected to offer (anonymous) FTP, as http back than has been too unreliable and when your download aborted, you had to re-download the complete file.
• Average workstations were running at 128-256 MB of RAM, the average server back than had something between 256 and 512 MB of RAM. Larger boxes were lucky of running at 768-1024 MB of RAM.
• Back than, you could easily DoS most web servers just by opening a few hundred idle connections.
  Software back then wasn't really built to withstand any higher usage scenarios or serious DoS attacks.
• Back then, people optimized their images by hand, cutting them into the magic 216-colour-"netscape"-palette for GIFs and made images small enough so that the web site would load within a few seconds.
• 1&1 is known for hosting sites on non-clustered, "smaller" servers. While upgrading their UPS in 2001, they experienced a major power outage, but were able to get back online within a few hours, as those hundreds of boxes did run their fsck in parallel. To compare: a few weeks later in 2001, their competitor Strato's highly-available storage clusters went offline for about a week and had to run a full fsck.
• "1&1 Puretec" back than has been offering shared web hosting plans for hosting personal and small office websites, which translates to "small files, short-living http-requests". Like today, 1&1 does rely on the Apache web server. You had ftp-level access to your website, but your hosting IP address has been shared among dozens of other customers, so you didn't have some way to run anonymous ftp on well-known ports.
• Apache back than also had the quite negative behaviour being served to a client to load about the whole file into RAM.
• Counterstrike has always been one large file of around 70-120 MB in size.

Now imagine what might've happened. Got it? No?

You've been hosting some file in a country where the average user would need a few hours to retrieve that file from some service which has been built for about the exact opposite of what you're doing. Once just a few people try to get your "mirror" file, they'll bring the web server down, swapping and crawling on its knees.

Your website is hosted on the same ip address than hundreds of other customers, so your website can't be moved to a different server. About the only thing the admin can do in that situation is to get those hundreds of users other than you back online is either to swap the core component of web hosting software (Apache) by "something yet to be invented", change from a non-clustered hosting service to a large-scaled cluster or simply prevent users from downloading your file.

Quick - mirror Linux ISOs!

[IBBoard]

Every time I see either a host offering "unlimited bandwidth" or someone saying "why should I pick the host you're with? For $2 per month less I can go to X and get unlimited bandwidth" I always end up wanting to have the spare change to sign up for an account, set it up as a Linux ISO or package mirror and seeing how long it lasts! Somehow I doubt it'll be long, but "unlimited" suckers in enough people that it obviously works. And then they'll wonder why either a) their server is dog slow (erm, someone is trying to use their "unlimited" and they've overloaded it) or b) they get stopped from using their unlimited (erm, because it is neither possible to offer true unlimited nor financially viable to offer very high amounts at that price).

Re:Quick - mirror Linux ISOs!

[Opportunist]

It's quite possible to offer unlimited traffic on a dedicated 100mbit link right to the backbone. But be prepared to share your paycheck with your ISP.

You get what you pay for. Pay too much, lose a bit of money. Pay too little, lose everything because the good you bought simply cannot fulfil its intended purpose. There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person's lawful prey. (allegedly said by John Ruskin, but IIRC it's not from him).

Re:Quick - mirror Linux ISOs!

[IBBoard]

I guess when it comes to computers then unlimited anything is possible, but things that my host offers unlimited of (like addon/parked domains, emails and databases) are effectively unlimited because you're constrained only by your use of the alphabet and (eventually) some possible limits of standards (e.g. domain lengths stop you using a true "unlimited" number of domains, but you're still looking at stupidly huge numbers). Disk space and bandwidth are more physically limited things - there's no such thing as an "unlimited disk", although you could cluster large disks (but that must have a limit), and there's no such thing as an "unlimited pipe" (especially on shared hosting where you're not the only one using it) although 100Mbps would get you quite high.

check the tos/eula

[arbiter1]

Their so called unlimited is only as long as you don't get to point of degrading the network for rest of the people that have hosting there.

Errata:

[Hurricane78]

Of course, I meant "There never will be an unlimited plan!"
(Sorry, I didn't sleep this night. Without any caffeine.)

Dreamhost did this a while ago.

[bluephone]

I've been with Dreamhost since 05 and they started offering unlimited to new customers a while ago, and they recently completed moving all old customers to unlimited too. The reality is, most people use a fraction of the offering anyway.

Re:Dreamhost did this a while ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

At least Dreamhost admitted to purposely overselling for that reason, most would never come close to the original quota system in place. So overselling, which all hosts do, was taken to the "unlimited" setup. And they managed to spend more money on new hardware thanks to it, which then increased their reliability tremendously.

Coming up on my first years end with them, since I'd already paid for the full 12 months, and wanted to make sure I wasn't getting BS'd when I asked them the policy on "unlimited bandwidth," I tested to see how far they'd let me go. So I placed many a mods up for CS:S, COD4 and a few linux ISOs. I asked a few people to download the mods over the course of the day, and the ISOs overnight, for a month straight. I had 5 people doing it every day and 20 at the peak. All in all, the lot of us burned through roughly 1TB in 1 month. they didnt bother me, not a peep. I since dropped the domain that was attempted on and have renewed twice for my other domains. No matter what I've done to see if they'd go along with it, they havent complained (with the exception of once, on a 500MB MySQL DB that was missing 2 indexes the app developer forgot to add. They actually added these indexes for me, decreased load times with that by a good half second or more. This wasnt a complaint, so much as a "hey, we fixed this for you, enjoy" message).

If other hosts go this route, they need to make sure that the few dozen people who do abuse the service, such as in the above example, aren't just dropped because they take advantage of something most users ignore.

Re:Dreamhost did this a while ago.

[Opportunist]

That's basically what makes this business model viable. Also, if everyone is doing it, the heavy users will "spread out" across the ISPs, that's why no single ISP would ever dream of offering it, simply because everyone who wants to use 100+ gig a month will sign up with him, ruining the business model.

It also only works as long as the rules of the game don't change. The telcos had to learn that the hard way when Internet became mainstream. Telcos in the US offered "unlimited", unmetered local calls. It worked well for ages. I mean, how many calls do you make per day? You yak a bit with a friend, hang up, free up the line. The few hardcore BBS junkies that hooked the line 24/7 were manageable.

The rules of this game change completely when the internet entered the living rooms of the US. Now everyone was on the line 24/7, getting a second line for phone calls (yes, kids, that was before the mobile phone fad). The "unlimited, unmetered" plan that worked under the premise that people make short phone calls, maybe taking half an hour a day or so, backfired badly under the pressure that people now stood online 24/7. Even more so when they did stay online permanently simply because of the threat that you might not get a free line because everything is busy, making the problem only worse.

ISPs might be wary to make a move they can't take back, especially since they were the ones that originally benefitted from a quite similar backfiring move by someone else. A truely "unlimited" plan could very easily backfire if something that uses a lot of bandwidth constantly become mainstream.

Like, say, P2P.

Re:Dreamhost did this a while ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

100GB seems a smidge low :) I did 3TB without trying on a $20/month VPS last month and didn't hear a peep from them. As long as I'm not blasting the processor 24/7 or using my burst ram more than 20% of the time its not a big deal, the pipes is cheap. I had a friend that used the same provider, and tried to host a very high volume (as in hit counts, not bandwidth) website and it maxed out something very quickly because he got cut off within hours because he was impacting other customers. So I think that in some cases its more how big of an inconvience your usage is rather than the actual usage amounts.

Re:Dreamhost did this a while ago.

[operator_error]

Dreamhost documented the practice of hosts overselling on their blog a few years ago.

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/18/the-truth-about-overselling/

FWIW, I've also been with them since '05, and while they've had their hiccups, I think the package is great; and they've become stronger in terms of infrastructure as a result. Speaking as a developer. I use their private servers now too, and am sooo pleased to have the root user capability added recently, alongside their groovy control panel which is fantastic.

Disclaimer: I get my basic ~$7 a month package hosted for free, pretty much forever, because I manage a site for a US, IRS documented charity, so Dreamhost gives me credit on my account for this month, every month for.

Re:Dreamhost did this a while ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

100+ gig a month?? really? We have a small website that does that in a day. It's media intensive, but that really is only around 6000 unique visitors a day, maybe 10000 visits..

These unlimited plans for $6-$20 are for mom and pop shops that will never ever get close to that amount of hits. They are for the places that get maybe 100 unique visitors a day. This is selling to the 90% of users.. 10% will account for 90% of the usage.

Re:Dreamhost did this a while ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dreamhost throttled me to 40 Kilobytes/s and lied to me that "cross-atlantic latency" (as in PING) was be to blame. All I did was host a lot of mixsets (about half the 600GB my account offered). Traffic was nowhere near the 6TB they promised me.

Re:Dreamhost did this a while ago.

[Glendale2x]

Whoa there wayback machine! I remember "teen lines", although I used mine to keep the modem dialed up 24/7.

Re:Dreamhost did this a while ago.

[petermgreen]

Afaict the biggest issue for webhosts nowadays is dynamic content. It's pretty easy for poorly optimised dynamic content to cause a lot of load and worse (unless the provider has a very fancy setup) that load is focussed on the one machine that hosts your site. That means anyone who shares a machine with you gets a massive performance hit (possiblly to the point of being unusable) when your unoptimised dynamic content site gets a big burst of load.

The good thing about network bandwidth is that there is usually far more bandwidth from a web server to the facility backbone than that server normally needs so if a site causes a burst of bandwidth it's nowhere near as big a deal as if a site starts hogging the CPU or disk.

Quota != speed

[Memroid]

It's not like I'll be able to start the next YouTube with one of these hosting accounts. Just because they won't charge you per x amount of bandwidth doesn't mean there won't be a direct correlation between your number of visitors and their viewing speeds. An unlimited quota, which is limited to 300 kb/s total for all of your users, is not unlimited.

Re:Quota != speed

[sopssa]

An unlimited quota, which is limited to 300 kb/s total for all of your users, is not unlimited.

Yeah, that is the only problem with hosting whole YouTube on a $3 shared hosting account.

Re:Quota != speed

[MeNeXT]

To add to this, what service are you expecting on a $9.95/month plan? Do you honestly think that you will get the help of knowledgeable tech when your server starts bouncing mail? These plans are only as good as the amount of business you are prepared to lose. With my experience with 1&1 is that even when you show them the problem and advise them on how to fix their servers, it still takes days to escalate the problem to someone who can do something about it.
 

Snake oil is only snake oil, there will always be someone willing to buy it!

I worked in hosting support...

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience an overwhelming amount of customers never come close to their data storage or transfer caps anyway. We hosted a mostly business websites and I saw many pages with a wopping 15-40 hits per month record.

You know all those lame drop shipping home businesses and MLMs? There are tons of people who buy into them. Not only do these people end up with unsold stock in their garages and basements... they also waste money on a few years worth of hosting fees.

They aren't really scrapping the caps...

[shacky003]

They are placing them elsewhere - They throttle the bandwidth at either the account level, or through throttling the hosting boxes.. "Unlimited" means no stated plan limit, not no limit.

I'm speaking as the current owner of a regional hosting provider in the north east US.. We don't play with this kind of pathetic marketing bait and switch crap... You can't get any more misleading

This is the same as the Cricket USB cell modems saying $40 a month for "unlimited" use - then the print at the end states that they will throttle you to a crawl if you go over 5 gb of
throughput (up and down) or throttle you at any time if you cause any adverse effects on their network. In other words, they will throttle your "unlimited" data plan for any reason
they want to, and promise to by the 5 gb mark..

Re:They aren't really scrapping the caps...

[Anonymous Coward]

We throttled a $50 customer that was costing us $1000 in bandwidth every month. It was an easy decision.

Re:They aren't really scrapping the caps...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you didn't tell him his plan was unlimited, hosting jerk : P

So tempting

[davmoo]

I am really tempted to go open an account at 1&1 and then really pump the bandwidth just to prove how full of crap they really are. The only people who get truly unlimited service are those who never even come close to using any kind of serious bandwidth. Its not that hard to do and you don't even have to host pr0n...just run bittorrent when a popular flavor of Linux like Ubuntu, Debian, or Mandriva updates their distro and you can easily saturate a 100mbit connection.

I lease several servers for myself and clients. For business use I won't even consider a plan that does not spell out *exactly* how much bandwidth is allowed, and how much overage costs.

If you want unlimited, be prepared to pay for it.

[sherl0k]

I have a server at server.lu and pay for an actual "unlimited" plan. There are other dedicated hosting providers that do the same. As long as the bandwidth is for legit purposes - aka you're not hosting a warez site or torrenting everything under the sun - it really is unlimited. I can push 100mbps all month long if I wanted to, as long as the bandwidth is there. Shared hosting plans offering this always have some sort of a caveat. Don't believe it, even 1&1's terms and conditions page has nothing about it. Either get the facts straight from the horses mouth or expect to be disappointed.

First hand experience.

[Narcocide]

Nobody ever believes that this would even be legal to do until it happens to them personally. After actually reading the terms of service on a couple of hosting plans that just sounded too good to be true in an effort to figure out how these companies were affording such cheap bandwidth I discovered the dirty secret. I tried to warn TWO friends (clients of two entirely separate companies) about this type of shady business going on in the economy hosting market but neither of them believed me until their accounts got cut off. The true shame is that honest companies are either sinking or being forced to play dirty too just to keep up because not enough consumers understand the difference between guaranteed and "guaranteed."

Are they going to tell anyone?

[dontmakemethink]

I've had a 1and1 hosting package for about 6 years, ever since they started hosting for individuals and not just corporate, and I learn about this through /. When are they planning to inform their clients? I use a secondary host for rich media, so this would have me overhauling my site and adding more content, should I get started? My latest email invoice doesn't say anything about this.

Re:Are they going to tell anyone?

[Rick Richardson]

Package Usage
Usage
Disk Space
1025 MB of 120000 MB in use
Transfer Volume unlimited
File Usage
11142 of 262144 files in use
Basics
E-mail 4 of 1200 mailboxes in use
Domain 1 of 2 included domains have been registered
Tools and Features
WebsiteBuilder 0 of 2 projects in use
max. 12 pages for each project
DynamicSiteCreator 0 of 3 projects in use
max. 12 pages for each project
MySQL Databases 3 of 25 databases in use
Scripts Supported Perl
Python
PHP

Re:Are they going to tell anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

1and1 customer here. They informed me, login to your admin panel and check your messages.

Re:Are they going to tell anyone?

[HeronBlademaster]

I'm a former 1&1 customer for a reason... and I used to love them. Turns out they decided to really prove they don't care about their customers.

Others have answered your question... most of the limits are listed in your admin control panel. However, over the years I had my account with 1&1, they raised the price on me once without notification, and they regularly changed my bandwidth limits, database limits, e-mail account limits, and so on. By "changed" I mean "sometimes up, sometimes down".

One limit that you should be aware of is the unpublished "12 concurrent apache process" limit. Their techs won't check for it, but if your sites are down (giving 500 errors) that might be the cause. Runaway PHP processes are troublesome.

Another thing to be aware of is that if you go over the 100MB database size limit, they won't do anything about it until you hit 150MB or so; at that point, they'll make your db read-only (with delete permissions). Say you've got a large blog storing data there - if your blog software writes to the db at login, you'll be unable to log in (and, therefore, unable to delete anything to get back under the limit).

If you do somehow manage to get back under the limit (say, by deleting things manually in phpMyAdmin), your db account is not given write access again. The easiest thing to do at that point is export the db, create a new one, import the data to the new one, and delete the old one. It's not worth your time trying to talk to their techs.

But, why am I giving you advice on using 1&1 properly? You should leave 1&1 entirely ;)

Re:Are they going to tell anyone?

[dontmakemethink]

Meh, I only use it for samples of my audio work, but I might offer to host a venue's website assuming it'll just be for listing upcoming shows etc.

Not enough hits

[Zoxed]

My Website does not get enough hits to need an Unlimited plan, you insensitive clod !

BlueHost does this as well.. but there's the catch

[Anonymous Coward]

BlueHost offers unlimited hosting space since few years, and my company hosts all our customer's websites with them.
But they did the trick: lowered the maximum file count limit of each account from 400,000 (source) to 50,000 (a very low limit, because each email message - *spam included* - is counted as file), as discussed in the BlueHost user forum (also see this forum discussion).
And they allow you to host up to 2,500 email account and unlimited domains.

All hosts have sleazy untold limits.

We're of course moving out of them, but we're sad because their support service was very good. And VPS providers have sleazy behavior as well.

It's ALWAYS been like that & it is WRONG... ap

[Anonymous Coward]

"My unlimited , "no data transfer quotas" account didn't last a whole hour." - by HughsOnFirst (174255) on Friday September 04, @03:24AM (#29308437)

I understand, & have FELT your frustration on this note myself, more than 13++ yrs. ago when I lived in Atlanta Ga. area & had mindspring (later bought out by earthlink) as my ISP (dialup days, 33k-56k days).

Back then, I had a successful "freeware" called "APK 3dFx Tuning Engine 2000++ SR-5" -> http://imagenes.sftcdn.net/es/scrn/5000/5384/4_APK3DF.jpg

(The application was for the then 'reigning champ' of 3d vidcards, 3dFx & their Voodoo I/II/III line)

It was being downloaded by users, alongside other freewares (OR, sharewares) I created.

At first? NO PROBLEMS!

Once the programs I wrote started "taking off/getting momentum" though, & once I had 'hooked up with' 3dFiles.com (a then very popular 3d apps & gamers website which was bought out by ZDNet & destroyed really (now is majorgeeks.com though))? The app started gaining HUGE amounts of downloaders.

Eventually, users started writing me in email, basically stating "I cannot get your file anymore" & I checked with my ISP - they said my bandwidth usage had been topping their monthly charts month in, & month out, & they decided to "cap me" once I passed a certain point of downloaded content from their servers (telling me then that I had to use a "business account" instead).

I was like "WTF? You people advertise as UNLIMITED UP/DOWN USAGE!!!" &, they did do that... heck, they ALL do, but as we both know? THIS IS A LIE & clearly a case of FALSE ADVERTISING... like so much of it is, or, much of what we hear & see via marketers is clearly "1/2 truths" - but, that STILL DOES NOT MAKE IT RIGHT TO DO!

APK

P.S.=> It happens, & it is, clearly, wrong... but, when you're not "big money"? You get crapped on, unless you want to go get an attorney, & spend monies (& for most things it is NOT worth it, & all you get is some b.s. "cease & desist" order issued for huge dollars) - I still think things like this are clearly "actionable", but, IANAL... nor, lol, would I wish to be! apk

Overselling hosts

[Badmovies]

Unlimited is obviously a gimmick, as there are limits to anything. Most "unlimited" plans have rules about usage, be it CPU or other, that allows the host to suspend the account. "unlimited" plans that cost $9.95 a month should be viewed with a critical eye. You get what you pay for with hosting. Before buying a hosting plan do some research on what hosts provide quality service, what price they charge, and what can be expected in terms of support. Oh, and always keep local backups of your data, and never sign up for an extended contract.

1&1 does not have a great reputation on www.webhostingtalk.com. Anyone with an interest in reading about the perils of unlimited plans (or hosting in general) should browse around that site.

Re:Overselling hosts

[Anonymous Coward]

Your not kidding.... Bluehost is one that recently started this unlimited BS. They have an undocumented limit of inodes (50K) and will suspend your site without notice. Moderators at their forum say this is for the greater good of a shared hosting environment. Myself, I think someone should be going after them for a unlimited policy that very clearly has a limit!

Unlimited Infinite

[cecil_turtle]

Unlimited does not mean infinite capacity, nor does it mean they will allow a single user to abuse their resources. Unlimited means there are no artificial limits imposed or quotas that you will hit in the normal course of doing business. If you use up the resources you have purchased (e.g. dedicated server CPU) then that wasn't a "limitation" that was imposed on you; you simply used up the resources you had purchased. When shared servers and bandwidth are the question then yes the definition of unlimited becomes a little more gray, but all the stories of "my account was shut off" is usually attributed to some single significant event or obvious case of abuse.

I'm not saying ISP's shouldn't try to create a more clear definition of what resources they can provide on what account levels, but I am saying that people shouldn't think the word "unlimited" implies infinite resources no matter what. Use common sense.

This makes perfect sense

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

The vast majority of people who have a website generally don't come anywhere near their limits. Generally people think that just because they put a website up about their cat that the world is going to be just as interested in it as they are.

Heh heh... seriously.....

If your getting serious traffic that means you're going past limits (obviously warez sites excepted) then you're happy to pay a little more when you expand.

It is a gimmick

[Lumpy]

I manage several sites on 1&1 and godaddy. and one thing I discovered is that the "unlimited" plans have a throttled output or use a reduced processor allotment on them. Joomla shows off slow processor or throttling quite a bit and the same host company but unlimited compared to a bandwidth metered account and the Joomla install on the unlimited plan is MUCH slower. Pages take from 7-10 seconds to render compared to the 1-3 seconds I get on the premium metered plan.

Yeah it's unlimited, but your speed throttled so you wont choke thme to death.

Re:BlueHost does this as well.. but there's the ca

[Anonymous Coward]

Well atleast they have email included, with GoDaddy to get any somewhat useful amount of email you need to add it to your hosting plan.

unlimited, unrestricted, THEY STILL SUCK

[Luyseyal]

I've switched over to Google Apps from 1&1 for my home domain. I don't like the restriction to Page Creator, but I'll live with it if the uptimes are better than flippin' 1&1, especially for free. Web Gmail was out yesterday, though since I use IMAP exclusively, I was unaffected. If Google has the same problems 1&1 has, I will switch to someone else.

I have one lousy domain left to switch.
-l

Re:unlimited, unrestricted, THEY STILL SUCK

[Glendale2x]

Google is waiting for everyone to switch to them before they change their mind. ;)

Common sense?!

[pbhj]

Here's the common sense - advertise unlimited if you have the resources to give me as much as I might ever ask for.

Restaurant: Unlimited Pies, $20

So I start eating pies, they run out after I've eaten 1. Sorry sir, those were the pies allocated under your contract, it's not fair if you eat more than one as we've sold the other pies to other people and told them they are unlimited. That's called fraud - though companies call it "overage" and "marketing" it's still fraudulent.

If the limitation is say the most pies ever eaten by anyone in the world + 1, then fair enough [this would maybe be equivalent to the most bandwidth it's possible to consume with the allowed proportion of CPU time that my account is limited to].

Well cheap hosting here is 100% unlimited 100Mbps

[Nicolas MONNET]

See dedibox.fr. They offer dedicated servers (originally custom-built VIA boards with 120G HDD, probably much better by now) with 100Mbps and completely unlimited traffic, for â30/month.
Another company has virtualized hosting that even cheaper, but you pay more for storage (on a SAN).

Nothing interesting

[Jesus IS the Devil]

These hosting space providers are a dime a dozen. A more interesting type is something like Topcities, which offers free application hosting with lots of free templates for Joomla, wordpress, phpbb, etc.

I have an old-time story, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

We hosted a turnip-growing contest in nineteen-tickety-two and we had an 1&1 "unlimited traffic" plan.

Guess what. After people started uploading photos of their turnips, 1&1 closed the connection. Might be because they were 4800 DPI scans of large-format photographs, as was was the style at the time.

Well, they not simply closed the server connection. It was CeBit some days later, and we were there at the 1&1 stand. The admin was Ike Eisenhower. So we asked him, what happened to our unlimited connection. He apologized and tried to re-open the line.

Only to find, that he himself could not connect to the server at all. It was blocked by the Fuhrer himself!

So don't believe their deliberate lies! There never will be!
There are only communists who calculate an average without thinking, when looking at their statistics of traffic up to now (with the limits).
And later, those dirty hippies panic when they notice that people actually will use that unlimited line, when they have it!

I'm scared and there are wolves after me.

TOS police

[tepples]

I run my own 'bedroom' server from consumer broadband

You have been reported to the TOS police, who is contacting you about upgrading you to business-class service.

made obsolete by cloud computing?

[bhxob]

Having never used 1&1, i can't speak to their service or resource levels, or more applicably to their resource usage levels.

However I can't say that I think that cloud computing will significantly displace shared hosting.

This says it better than I could I think.
http://www.internetblog.org.uk/post/404/will-cloud-computing-replace-shared-hosting

Cloud computing is great in that it only charges users for the server power they use. That's why rapidly expanding companies with unpredictable IT needs love it. But the truth is, the average hosting customer's needs are very predictable.

A typical shared hosting user probably only utilizes 500 MB of space at most and under 3 GB of bandwidth a month. Hosting companies know what to expect from their users and most website traffic rarely fluctuates enough to take advantage of cloud computing features.

Sayegh is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. I think introducing the cloud to a shared hosting environment would simply add too much complexity and I don't see it being adopted en masse by hosts any time soon.

TOS...

[future assassin]

You just have to read the TOS so see that all the unlimited hosts give them seleves unlimited excuses to shut your website down if you attempt to use your unlimited resources.

Re:TOS...

[bhxob]

This is true of any service related business.

My host did this to me without telling me

[alex_guy_CA]

I am a San Francisco Photographer. After every wedding I shoot I put a gallery of photos online. They are low resolution proofs, but it is over 1,000 photos per wedding usually, so they ad up after a while. I am usually bumping against my storage limits with my host (inmotion hosting, whom I've been happy with) So, the other day, I finish a corporate job, and I'm putting all high resolution of the photos online in a big zip file. I log into my cpanel to check if it puts me over my limit and I see "Disk Space Usage 35319.49/ MB" I could not believe what I was reading. I called the host, and I'm all like "It says I have unlimited storage" and the guy says "that's right" and I just sit there on the phone waiting for the catch. Finally he's like "um, are you done?" I'm paying all of $120 a year for this plan. I could use this for offsite backup if only AT&T had better upload speeds.

"number of files" limitation

[Anonymous Coward]

when will they get rid of that pos restriction?!

Actually using "unlimited" services.

[Animats]

One of my sites, "downside.com", has a MySQL database of every Securities and Exchange Commission filing since 2000. There's a cron job that updates the database from the SEC site every day at 4 AM. This used to run on EZPublishing, until they gave up hosting to focus on "permission e-mail" (really). It's now running on an $14.95 "unlimited" hosting account at HostGator.

It works, but HostGator does have some undocumented restrictions. One was that they kill MySQL requests which run more than a few seconds. So I had to speed up one transaction that could run long (a good idea anyway) and the database upload had to be done a few hundred records at a time. The daily cron job only runs about a minute, and they're OK with that.

Once, HostGator lost a hard drive and lost the database. The cron job can automatically rebuild the database by re-reading the SEC data for each missing day. (This takes care of routine recovery after downtime). But when the cron job ran for hours, rebuilding nine years of missing data, HostGator didn't like it. We had to talk about that one, and they recovered the database from a backup. That took hours of MySQL time, but they did it.

It's a low-traffic site, though. When I did it, nobody else had SEC filings in a free database. Now all the search engines do. I keep it up more as a reminder of the financial mistakes of the dot-com era. (Although I did call the mortgage crisis in 2006 and put that on Downside. This stuff is obvious if you understand the fundamentals.)

Terms of Service

[AmigaHeretic]

A hosting service I use to use offered unlimited everything, but their terms of service were such that you can't just use it to host your files. You can't backup your HD to their HDs etc etc

*****.com does NOT provide unlimited space for online storage, backups, or archiving of electronic files, documents, log files, etc., and any such prohibited use of the Services will result in the termination of Subscriber's account, with or without notice.
---
All file placed online must have a web purpose.

Needless to say I mostly used it for file storage. Though I'm sure there are better places to get unlimited file storage from then from a web hosting service.

"Unlimited" should die

[sjames]

There's no such thing. There's a limit somewhere. Either they throttle the connection so that it's impossible to use more than they would like to offer or they just terminate all unprofitable accounts. If the latter, sometimes it 'accidentally' goes down they 'kindly' let you out of your contract, sometimes they invent a TOS violation or claim you're "abusing" your unlimited service by using it without limits, and sometimes they just tell you to take a hike.

It doesn't especially matter how, it still destroys all efficiency in the market. A healthy market requires an informed buyer who can weigh the offers and find the best value. If everyone hides the limits under an untruthful blanket of "unlimited" you have no way to compare the value offered for the money.

They do it for 2 reasons. Some because they offer poor value for the money and want to fool you into paying them anyway. Others claim unlimited because in a world where a bunch of crappy providers claim unlimited, a provider of good value doesn't stand a chance if they actually admit to having limits.

The FTC would be doing the good providers a huge favor if they either banned claims of unlimited or actually forced any provider that does claim it to actually live up to it right until they go out of business hosting youtube.com for $5/month.

Either way, then customers could actually compare on value for price. Providers that actually want to compete on value would be able to do so.

Try it out

[evilviper]

Okay. Somebody fork over the $15, upload a dozen Linux ISOs, and get added to the primary websites as a mirror site...

I'm betting it'll take just a couple days before you find out just how "unlimited" your service is.

data transfer rate unlimited but processor rate no

[Anonymous Coward]

They 'forget' to tell you that they limit processor resources. Infinite data transfer, but your account gets suspended if you use more than say 2% of a shared server. Just look up host lunarpages.com. Overselling.

Re:Well cheap hosting here is 100% unlimited 100Mb

[GPLHost-Thomas]

Who cares about this bad offer with no SLA, bad delays, no support, and poor hardware?

Unlimited coke somewhere?

[GPLHost-Thomas]

When you go to a fast-food shop in the USA, you get a so called "unlimited soda" thing in most of them. It never pops into ones mind that he can come with a truck, and fill it fully with that unlimited soda. Why what applies to McDo doesn't work for web hosting is a mystery!
Is it that people think that, with technology, things can really go unlimited? Wake-up buddies, there's no such thing as unlimited speed fiber optic network wires, or unlimited space hard drives, which makes the unlimited plans simply as invalid as the unlimited soda offers at fast food shops...
Besides that, the comparison is very valid, because hosts with unlimited plans are as un-tasty and as aggressively sold as the worst hamburger. It's simply bad quality, bad service and you only get what you pay for.

Re:Well cheap hosting here is 100% unlimited 100Mb

[Nicolas MONNET]

I have critical services (mail, DNS, web) on the expensive hosting and non-critical ones (basic monitoring, backup and video hosting) on the cheap BW one.

Selling the wrong thing

[FreekyGeek]

As usual, merchants are selling products the way THEY want to, not the way their customers want. Take me, for example (and I think I'm a pretty typical example). I have a few small, relatively low-traffic web sites that bring in a few extra bucks a month. Most months the bandwidth I use is well within my plan and the price of the plan is quite reasonable. I certainly can't afford - or at least don't want to pay for - dedicated servers and high bandwidth caps when it wouldn't be worth the money.

But I live in fear of my own success. What if that magic day comes when I get Slasdotted or Popular on Digg? Under my current plan, I'm sure my site would quickly go over it's "unlimited" cap and get shut off - and there I am, watching a potentially extremely lucrative day for me go down the drain as millions of hits bounce off a 404.

I don't want high bandwitdth caps ALL the time. I want "slashdot insurance". I want "Digg insurance". I don't use lots of bandwidth very often, but I want it on tap when I need it most. I don't mind paying (within reason) if I go over limit as long as the capacity is there when I need it. I want *flexible* capacity.

I'd pay a big hosting company an extra $1 or $2 a month for that kind of insurance - "your web site won't go down due to traffic (but we will charge you per GB over )". Or better yet, charge me per GB over my limit, but only up to a predetermined amount - say, "If I go over my limit, keep the gates open and charge me per GB until it gets to $500, then shut it down." Like a buffer or "overdraft protection" for my bandwidth. Or even let unused bandwidth "roll over" like cell=phone minutes, so people like me who are almost always well under the limit can suck up some extra once in a while without getting killed.

There are lots of different, better ways to sell bandwidth beyond "hard limit" and "fake-unlimited". They need to put together different "calling plans" to suit different needs.