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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."
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.
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
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.