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."
SLA (Score:2, Insightful)
How much is unlimited? (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems the word unlimited never actually means unlimited when internet services are involved. My "unlimited" internet on my mobile phone contract is actually 500MB. Everything is "Unlimited" is Capped or has a Fair Use Policy.
If I ever see the word Unlimited when advertising a service, I dismiss it out of hand and look for the small print.
I understand that an "unlimited" service is practically impossible to provide- I just ask the service providers don't use the word. Tell me the actual amount and then I don't have to read the terms and conditions of every offer to compare products.
Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers? (Score:3, Insightful)
For my money, I'll stick with cloud services that are metered honestly and transparently.
Re:On the flip side (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:On the flip side (Score:3, Insightful)
As Google's outtage hopefully demonstrated, cloud computing is risky and it is better to depend on as few contract resources as possible.
No, all it indicates is that a lot of people are idiots who overreact to whatever hype the media is currently blabbering about. It's why you get 60 hour waiting times in every ER when the media says that some horrible new disease has just killed 15 people in the past two months.
The rest are well aware that any locally hosted service will have an even worse reliability than google or cost so much it's not worth it for most people.
Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers? (Score:5, Insightful)
My perception has been that the cloud services (Amazon, Google, slicehost, mosso, etc) have realistic, sustainable per-unit costs whereas shared hosting outfits tend to have completely unrealistic cost assessments. They count on the fact that most people won't use their full quota because there's no way they could deliver what they promise to every user without ending up WAY in the red.
FYI, everyone does this.
Your ISP, your phone carrier, probably your electrical and water company... even some software developers. They have very high upkeep costs, and very low costs for actually keeping you connected. The hope is you'll be one of the users that helps pay their upkeep, rather than actually using their service.
Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh, banks do the same thing with your deposits.
Re:My experiance with "no data transfer quotas" (Score:5, Insightful)
each visitor accounted for 13,000 hits and 6,000+ largish photos
Your server's failure was due to bad web design. No server could have handled that, regardless of the kind of uplink. Unlimited transfer volume does not also mean unlimited CPU power, unlimited RAM and unlimited hard disk bandwidth.
Overselling hosts (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [webhostingtalk.com]. Anyone with an interest in reading about the perils of unlimited plans (or hosting in general) should browse around that site.
Re:My experiance with "no data transfer quotas" (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, why in GODS name did you post this thing on SLASHDOT?!
Because he is a troll, and his post is just a poorly disguised attempt at getting more users to click on his dumb link.
Re:SLA (Score:3, Insightful)
One interesting factor that many ignore is that big hosting companies like HostGator, host so many sites that their peak loads are based upon general internet peak loads. Unless you have a HUGE audience most likely your specific site getting hit frequently possibly means another popular site is getting hit less often. Lets say that on average at 8pm/EST (a typical peak time) 2% (a random guess on my part) of people surfing the internet in the US are viewing a HostGator site. That metric is not going to change from day to day much at all, even if one specific site is getting slash-dotted.
Re:Dreamhost did this a while ago. (Score:3, Insightful)
Afaict the biggest issue for webhosts nowadays is dynamic content. It's pretty easy for poorly optimised dynamic content to cause a lot of load and worse (unless the provider has a very fancy setup) that load is focussed on the one machine that hosts your site. That means anyone who shares a machine with you gets a massive performance hit (possiblly to the point of being unusable) when your unoptimised dynamic content site gets a big burst of load.
The good thing about network bandwidth is that there is usually far more bandwidth from a web server to the facility backbone than that server normally needs so if a site causes a burst of bandwidth it's nowhere near as big a deal as if a site starts hogging the CPU or disk.