Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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.
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.