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."
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.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
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.
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
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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
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.
"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.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
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.
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
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.
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.)