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)
Re:SLA (Score:4, Informative)
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TOS police (Score:2)
I run my own 'bedroom' server from consumer broadband
You have been reported to the TOS police, who is contacting you about upgrading you to business-class service.
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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
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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 chan
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.
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Not only that, but they've been offering "unlimited" bandwidth for at least 10 years, why is this news now? Quick google search [google.com] reveals hundreds of sites offering "unlimited bandwidth". There's even a website from 2003 that explains what "unlimited bandwidth" really means [archive.org], which is basically it's unlimited until we notice you and decide to cancel service because our TOS all
GoDaddy is an amusing name (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Hey! I resemble that remark!
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No, no all night parties, but shooing stray kids off the lawn can get a bit noisy.
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No, no all night parties, but shooing stray kids off the lawn can get a bit noisy.
At first I misread that as shooting!
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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.
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I'm surprised they didn't make the shorter leap from Jomax --> Jo Mama
Imagine the fun commercials they could have made with that name!
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I have been using their services for two years without so much as even a minor glitch. They host my domains and a vLAMP server the domains are pointed at. My service is not unlimited. I get up to 150GB of storage, and 15GB of traffic per month. I've never even come close to either cap, even hosting a few large videos for limited access to friends and family. I use it as my personal playground in The Cloud..... So far it's been much easier to manage than a 'bedroom' server. I do also maintain a local
What is cloud computing if not hosted servers? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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For my money, I'll stick with cloud services that are metered honestly and transparently.
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, 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.
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Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh, banks do the same thing with your deposits.
Re:What is cloud computing if not hosted servers? (Score:4, Interesting)
The truth is, almost all users will use much less than their quota. I've run, in the past and present, a bunch of personal sites of varying popularity: a web design portal, an e-card site, a blog, etc. They got from hundreds to tens of thousands of uniques/day. Even on the busiest months, I my bandwidth use was calculated in GB or tens of GB. Baring traffic anomalies, like the slashdoting my dropbox.com account got a couple days ago, you need either extremely heavy content (video) or to be hugely popular to get past 100GB/month. I doubt if 0.5% of dreamhost or 1&1 accounts do that kind of traffic.
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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.
Not only that, but shared hosts put limits on customer accounts that they don't tell customers about.
For example, 1&1 puts a limit of 12 apache processes on each shared hosting account. What does that mean? It means if you have a PHP website, and 13 people connect to any domain on the account within the same second, at least one of them will get a 500 server error.
That might not seem so bad, but if something breaks and PHP processes start freezing up, then apache will spawn new processes to serve new
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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
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Rule 1: Never use 1and1 or as it's know in germanny 1und1. They are the shittiest company ever.
Seconded. [orderingdisorder.com]
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On the flip side (Score:1)
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:4, Funny)
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.
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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.
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The big thing that a properly run datacenter gives you is highly reliable power, network links and cooling (granted the last one may not be an issue if it's just the odd box and your local climate isn't too hot).
FTTH will give you more bandwidth (though not nessacerally much more) to your communication providers most local node but that is all it's likely to get you. It's still likely to both be badly congested and not particulally reliable/quickly fixed.
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Yes, and when that Fiber goes out for a week, you'll have plenty of opportunity to revel in just how much "control" you have.
Good luck getting you ISP to allow BGP updates, for multihoming.
And your UPSes and generators are in good shape, right?
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
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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?
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If I ever see the word Unlimited when advertising a service, I dismiss it out of hand and look for the small print.
While I agree with you in principle, I feel I should mention the one service I've seen that effectively does provide what it promises:
Unlimited text messaging plans from AT&T are true to their word. If there's a hidden limit on that, it's set higher than any sane person could possibly use. (My sister's first month with unlimited texting racked up something like 6,000 text messages, and that's on top of what the other four of us on the plan were using. AT&T never complained, so they must not care.
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Actually texting doesn't cost the cell company anything at all, since texts are sent in (previously) unused space in the command channels (i.e. when the cell phone updates its location with the tower, it'll send a text if it has one to send). Since these updates happen anyway, they're essentially free for the carriers.
Yes, I agree that the standalone text messaging rates are ridiculous. I'll even add that the charge for the unlimited texting package is ridiculously high ($30 which covers all five lines).
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Unlimited means that there is no artificial limit. The natural limit, which is bandwidth*time, still exists, obviously.
The problem isn't that there's a natural limit, the problem is that a lot of companies use "unlimited" when in fact the limit is artificial, not natural.
Wasn't it just last year that Comcast finally admitted that their "unlimited" cable internet service (i.e. no transfer cap) was actually capped at 200GB/month?
Two years ago it was a Comcast sales guy who told me "there's no limit, but if you use too much we cut you off." He wouldn't answer the question "how much is too much?" except to repeat himself.
My experiance with "no data transfer quotas" (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [digg.com]
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
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.
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THIS.
Also, why in GODS name did you post this thing on SLASHDOT?!
Say bye to your site again in 3...2...1...
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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.
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That's not a link to my site, it's a link to a digg story that links to another site that in turn links to a site that has a link to my site.
If you are too lazy to find my site I really don't care if you can find it, on the other hand you are actually interested and take the effort find it, fine.
Anyway I think you meant spammer, not troll. Trolls are generally anonymous posters of unfounded or ignorant (did you click the link?) claims and general snarkiness.
I filter both out of my blog, and no I'm not link
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Are you trying to crash your server again out of spite or something? :)
It's not like I put the url into the post, and if you want to go to trouble of finding the site that's fine. According to google there are "about 14,200" mentions of it on various web pages with about five thousand blogs linking to it.
The New York Times, Canadian public broadcasting, The Guardian in the UK, a bunch of other newspapers in Scotland, Italy, a business magazine in Denmark, Time Magazine, Fox News, Wikipedia, and a zillion photography related sites all link to it
At this point I'm not too worried
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Did they block you from transferring data, or did your server run out of processing power?
Or did you somehow think bandwidth was the same thing as the other server performance metrics?
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If you're actually the OP (which I'm doubting due to AC), that's a pretty important detail to mention in your claim. If the server survived and gave a "Quota Reached" message, that's a very specific failure case at odds with a "no quotas" claim.
In the OP it was just stated "my account didn't last". That's awfully vague and could be for any number of reasons other than bandwidth.
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Hi there, OP here
Yes it was a badly written site generated with a shell script intended for about 8 people to see so we could talk about an art exhibition buried in a bunch of test sites for clients, and yes I was so far over the transaction limit that they even turned the logging software off. I learned about it in about an hour when a client called me on the phone wondering what happened to his test page
The hosting company , Host Monster , was very reasonable about the whole thing and I only have good thi
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.
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Would you please also tell us where we have to move to instead of just dangling that carrot?
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So.. Canada?
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95th percentile has been a standard way of billing business-class hosting for at least the last decade, AFAICT.
The big change around here is that overage charges and base bandwidth charges are going down and getting replaced with electricity costs. I'm paying a bloody buck a VA, making my bandwidth bill almost irrelevant.
Of course, I'm not dealing with your mickey-mouse $30 virtual server hosting plans; I have a 100% power and 'net SLA, ~40 peers, 24x7 competent staff, physical security, dual/redundant powe
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).
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I have critical services (mail, DNS, web) on the expensive hosting and non-critical ones (basic monitoring, backup and video hosting) on the cheap BW one.
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Let's see... tons of computers whirring softly to soothe you to sleep, industrial strenngth air condition, no windows or other sources of natural light, industrial strength UPSs...
When can I move in?
Unlimited? (Score:1)
There's no such thing as unlimited.
There is a limit, they just don't tell you what it is. At some point, you'll get an email telling you you're using too much resources.
Also, providers that have unlimited storage have conditions that you can't upload anything you want (uploading large files to share with people for example)
I'm paying $10 a month for a VPS and I'm getting 20GB of storage and 500GB bandwidth a month. I'm using maybe 2GB which is the OS, a few sites, and some pictures and movies of a trip, my
First hand experience. (Score:1)
Nobody ever believes that this would even be legal to do until it happens to them personally. After actually reading the terms of service on a couple of hosting plans that just sounded too good to be true in an effort to figure out how these companies were affording such cheap bandwidth I discovered the dirty secret. I tried to warn TWO friends (clients of two entirely separate companies) about this type of shady business going on in the economy hosting market but neither of them believed me until their a
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!
Errata: (Score:2)
Of course, I meant "There never will be an unlimited plan!"
(Sorry, I didn't sleep this night. Without any caffeine.)
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Well, give 'em the benefit of doubt, they might just have been too clueless to figure out what congested the network... It's 1&1 after all...
But yes, it's amazing what companies sell and how angry they get when you actually want to use what you pay for. I have no problem with an offer that says "20 Gig a month and then we cut your wire". Or "10 Gig". Or whatever arbitrary number. But claiming "unlimited" and then strangely resulting in funky problems that for some reason can't be solved is simply dishon
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Yep, there's a difference between "unlimited" and "Internet unlimited". See every other Slashdot article about Comcast over the past decade.
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"The admin could not connect as if there was an invisible device in-between"?
It's OK if you're not very technically inclined. But it sounds like you didn't take even basic measures to investigate the loss of access to your server.
Their management units get wedged preventing sercon access, remote reboot, etc. I had a server with them until this happened. My main website was down almost 5 days until they found somebody with a clue to reboot it. I was on the phone with the Phillipines for over 20 hours with
Quick - mirror Linux ISOs! (Score:2)
Every time I see either a host offering "unlimited bandwidth" or someone saying "why should I pick the host you're with? For $2 per month less I can go to X and get unlimited bandwidth" I always end up wanting to have the spare change to sign up for an account, set it up as a Linux ISO or package mirror and seeing how long it lasts! Somehow I doubt it'll be long, but "unlimited" suckers in enough people that it obviously works. And then they'll wonder why either a) their server is dog slow (erm, someone is
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It's quite possible to offer unlimited traffic on a dedicated 100mbit link right to the backbone. But be prepared to share your paycheck with your ISP.
You get what you pay for. Pay too much, lose a bit of money. Pay too little, lose everything because the good you bought simply cannot fulfil its intended purpose. There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person's lawful prey. (allegedly said by Jo
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I guess when it comes to computers then unlimited anything is possible, but things that my host offers unlimited of (like addon/parked domains, emails and databases) are effectively unlimited because you're constrained only by your use of the alphabet and (eventually) some possible limits of standards (e.g. domain lengths stop you using a true "unlimited" number of domains, but you're still looking at stupidly huge numbers). Disk space and bandwidth are more physically limited things - there's no such thing
check the tos/eula (Score:1)
Dreamhost did this a while ago. (Score:2)
Re:Dreamhost did this a while ago. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Whoa there wayback machine! I remember "teen lines", although I used mine to keep the modem dialed up 24/7.
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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 usua
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Dreamhost documented the practice of hosts overselling on their blog a few years ago.
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/18/the-truth-about-overselling/ [dreamhost.com]
FWIW, I've also been with them since '05, and while they've had their hiccups, I think the package is great; and they've become stronger in terms of infrastructure as a result. Speaking as a developer. I use their private servers now too, and am sooo pleased to have the root user capability added recently, alongside their groovy control panel which is fantasti
Quota != speed (Score:1)
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An unlimited quota, which is limited to 300 kb/s total for all of your users, is not unlimited.
Yeah, that is the only problem with hosting whole YouTube on a $3 shared hosting account.
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To add to this, what service are you expecting on a $9.95/month plan? Do you honestly think that you will get the help of knowledgeable tech when your server starts bouncing mail? These plans are only as good as the amount of business you are prepared to lose. With my experience with 1&1 is that even when you show them the problem and advise them on how to fix their servers, it still takes days to escalate the problem to someone who can do something about it.
Snake oil is only snake oil, there
They aren't really scrapping the caps... (Score:1)
I'm speaking as the current owner of a regional hosting provider in the north east US.. We don't play with this kind of pathetic marketing bait and switch crap... You can't get any more misleading
This is the same as the Cricket USB cell modems saying $40 a month for "unlimited" use - then the print at the end states that
So tempting (Score:2)
I am really tempted to go open an account at 1&1 and then really pump the bandwidth just to prove how full of crap they really are. The only people who get truly unlimited service are those who never even come close to using any kind of serious bandwidth. Its not that hard to do and you don't even have to host pr0n...just run bittorrent when a popular flavor of Linux like Ubuntu, Debian, or Mandriva updates their distro and you can easily saturate a 100mbit connection.
I lease several servers for mysel
If you want unlimited, be prepared to pay for it. (Score:1)
Are they going to tell anyone? (Score:2)
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Package Usage
Usage
Disk Space
1025 MB of 120000 MB in use
Transfer Volume unlimited
File Usage
11142 of 262144 files in use
Basics
E-mail 4 of 1200 mailboxes in use
Domain 1 of 2 included domains have been registered
Tools and Features
WebsiteBuilder 0 of 2 projects in use
max. 12 pages for each project
DynamicSiteCreator 0 of 3 projects in use
max. 12 pages for each project
MySQL Databases 3 of 25 databases in use
Scripts Supported Perl
Python
PHP
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I'm a former 1&1 customer [orderingdisorder.com] for a reason... and I used to love them. Turns out they decided to really prove they don't care about their customers.
Others have answered your question... most of the limits are listed in your admin control panel. However, over the years I had my account with 1&1, they raised the price on me once without notification, and they regularly changed my bandwidth limits, database limits, e-mail account limits, and so on. By "changed" I mean "sometimes up, sometimes down".
One
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Not enough hits (Score:2)
My Website [zoxed.eu] does not get enough hits to need an Unlimited plan, you insensitive clod !
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.
Unlimited Infinite (Score:2)
This makes perfect sense (Score:2)
Heh heh... seriously.....
If your getting serious traffic that means you're going past limits (obviously warez sites excepted) then you're happy to pay a little more when you expand.
It is a gimmick (Score:2)
I manage several sites on 1&1 and godaddy. and one thing I discovered is that the "unlimited" plans have a throttled output or use a reduced processor allotment on them. Joomla shows off slow processor or throttling quite a bit and the same host company but unlimited compared to a bandwidth metered account and the Joomla install on the unlimited plan is MUCH slower. Pages take from 7-10 seconds to render compared to the 1-3 seconds I get on the premium metered plan.
Yeah it's unlimited, but your spee
unlimited, unrestricted, THEY STILL SUCK (Score:2)
I've switched over to Google Apps from 1&1 for my home domain. I don't like the restriction to Page Creator, but I'll live with it if the uptimes are better than flippin' 1&1, especially for free. Web Gmail was out yesterday, though since I use IMAP exclusively, I was unaffected. If Google has the same problems 1&1 has, I will switch to someone else.
I have one lousy domain left to switch.
-l
Re: (Score:2)
Google is waiting for everyone to switch to them before they change their mind. ;)
Common sense?! (Score:2)
Here's the common sense - advertise unlimited if you have the resources to give me as much as I might ever ask for.
Restaurant: Unlimited Pies, $20
So I start eating pies, they run out after I've eaten 1. Sorry sir, those were the pies allocated under your contract, it's not fair if you eat more than one as we've sold the other pies to other people and told them they are unlimited. That's called fraud - though companies call it "overage" and "marketing" it's still fraudulent.
If the limitation is say the most
Nothing interesting (Score:2)
These hosting space providers are a dime a dozen. A more interesting type is something like Topcities, which offers free application hosting with lots of free templates for Joomla, wordpress, phpbb, etc.
TOS... (Score:2)
My host did this to me without telling me (Score:2)
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.)
Terms of Service (Score:2)
Needless
"Unlimited" should die (Score:2)
There's no such thing. There's a limit somewhere. Either they throttle the connection so that it's impossible to use more than they would like to offer or they just terminate all unprofitable accounts. If the latter, sometimes it 'accidentally' goes down they 'kindly' let you out of your contract, sometimes they invent a TOS violation or claim you're "abusing" your unlimited service by using it without limits, and sometimes they just tell you to take a hike.
It doesn't especially matter how, it still destroy
Try it out (Score:2)
Okay. Somebody fork over the $15, upload a dozen Linux ISOs, and get added to the primary websites as a mirror site...
I'm betting it'll take just a couple days before you find out just how "unlimited" your service is.
Selling the wrong thing (Score:2)
As usual, merchants are selling products the way THEY want to, not the way their customers want. Take me, for example (and I think I'm a pretty typical example). I have a few small, relatively low-traffic web sites that bring in a few extra bucks a month. Most months the bandwidth I use is well within my plan and the price of the plan is quite reasonable. I certainly can't afford - or at least don't want to pay for - dedicated servers and high bandwidth caps when it wouldn't be worth the money.
But I live in