Hosting Data-Transfer Quotas Are Fading Out 135
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."
Re:SLA (Score:4, Informative)
Always been on 95th percentile (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Lies, damn lies, and repeated lies! (Score:5, Informative)
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:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers? (Score:5, Informative)
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:GoDaddy is an amusing name (Score:3, Informative)
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:Always been on 95th percentile (Score:1, Informative)
So.. Canada?
Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers? (Score:2, Informative)
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:SLA (Score:4, Informative)
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:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers? (Score:1, Informative)
Well cheap hosting here is 100% unlimited 100Mbps (Score:3, Informative)
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).
Actually using "unlimited" services. (Score:4, Informative)
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.)