Unlimited Space & Bandwidth Hosting – Is really everything unlimited?

The term “Unlimited” has successfully worked for many businesses. Unlimited surfing, unlimited web space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited products, unlimited shopping etc it goes on and on. This word has helped many businesses to generate great business. The word “Unlimited” is so catchy that people just go ahead with it, they don’t think about the pros and cons of this word, so many people usually end up scratching their heads. A saga of negative feedback starts rolling all over the web world.

The “Unlimited” factor works greatly in the web hosting arena. There are many web hosting providers offering cPanel shared hosting plans with unlimited space and bandwidth. The prices tagged for unlimited hosting packages are very tempting that people immediately sign ups for the service. These hosting packages are bundled with all the standard features like adding sub-domains, addon domains, creating FTP accounts, setting up multiple mail boxes, auto-installer software, web mail, traffic analyzer tool etc. Some hosting providers offer their own in-built control panel to manage the hosting account while many hosting providers offer industry leading control panels like cPanel or Plesk. It becomes easy to migrate the data from one hosting provider to other if you are using cPanel or Plesk. For smooth migration, consider the same control panel with your new service provider which your current hosting provider offers.

The unlimited hosting packages works well, if you are running a completely new website or a low traffic website. It’s a shared environment, you pay for a small portion of the server resources. There are some limitations and restrictions defined which you will usually find in terms of service or data usage policy. These documents are not highlighted on the product page or sign up page, they are mostly linked in the website footer or the sitemap. A customer never reads these documents before signing up for the hosting service. A static website with upto 20,000 to 30,000 visitors a month can continue to work from the Unlimited shared hosting packages. But it doesn’t mean that the same amount of visitors can be handled on a shared hosting platform if it’s an eCommerce website or a WordPress site with heavy theme and number of plugins.

It’s always recommended to start from shared hosting but it’s also very important to upgrade to the higher packages as the website demands more resources. A completely new eCommerce website with hundreds of products and high resolution images may face latency issue even if there are few visitors on  your website. Even if you have unlimited space and bandwidth, the website will not work from the shared hosting platform and the hosting provider would request you to move onto atleast a VPS hosting server. The website needs more processing power and memory to run smoothly. In unlimited hosting packages, even if a website is utilizing few MB’s or GB’s of disk space and bandwidth it would be suspended if it consumes more CPU resources.

The term “Unlimited” is a marketing gimmick used to lure customers. The unlimited shared hosting packages doesn’t allows you to use all the processing power or memory. A shared environment is specially for websites who are using an average amount of resources without impacting the server performance. If you are serious about your website and don’t want to loose your visitors then don’t keep hopping from one provider to other. Shell out some money out of your pocket to get the right hosting package for your website. Unlimited hosting service can be practically offered by US and Europe hosting providers. But when it comes to India, it’s practically impossible for a hosting service provider to offer unlimited space and bandwidth packages. The cost of hardware and specially bandwidth is very high in comparison to the offshore countries. If you are hosting your website in India for SEO reasons, check the server location of the provider before you sign up. The cost of cPanel web hosting in India would be comparatively higher than the hosting packages of offshore service providers. If you want to host your website in India in a Tier 3 datacenter, you will have to pay slightly more.

There are some big players in India offering unlimited space and bandwidth packages. There serves are mostly colocated in the US datacenters. A website should be hosted in the location where it’s targeted audience are based. If you are setting up a website and it’s  targeted for the Indian visitors, then host your website on Indian servers. Your visitors would get better browsing speed and search engines would categorize your website and boost your position in the search engine rankings.

Analyze your website requirements and select a hosting package accordingly.

Author Bio – My name is Neha Khanna, I am working with MilesWeb.com – managed web hosting provider in India. I like to write on various topics like web hosting, social media, cms, affiliate etc.