The word ‘Unlimited’ sounds fantastic when its associated with a service you just purchased and when it’s related to web hosting services, it feels too good to be true doesn’t it? Every web hosting firm provides you with various ‘Unlimited’ plans ‐ be it Unlimited Bandwidth, Unlimited Space, and so on, but what does ‘Unlimited’ really mean? Does it mean that you can put up whatever you like on your website and no one will object? let’s find out.

What is ‘Unlimited Hosting’?

Unless you are using Dedicated Servers, a normal hosting package uses shared resources i.e. multiple users share hosting packages on the same server. As technology & the capabilities of our servers continue to grow, we can continually allow you to do more with your hosting package and its bandwidth. This means that we can offer practically unlimited resources for legitimate users of our hosting products who use them for the right purposes.

The way shared hosting is sold has undergone substantial changes over the years. In earlier times hosting companies and consumers would obsess over every single parameter, i.e., # of database accounts, # of FTP accounts, amount of bandwidth, amount of disk space, number of i-nodes, etc. But with today’s robust technology, we can afford to declare all parameters unlimited because in theory we can afford to offer nearly limitless resources to most customers who choose to host with us.

Selling hosting as unlimited is a way of letting the legitimate consumer know that they don’t have to sit and calculate what each parameter does ‐ they can just buy the unlimited package and it will work for them. This is how the industry has evolved over time.

What does ‘Unlimited’ not permit?

Every hosting package comes with a set of AUPs that must be agreed upon before purchase of the package is complete. Listed below are some specific examples of things that are not allowed:

• File upload / sharing / archive / backup / mirroring / distribution sites.
• A site created primarily to drive traffic to another site.
• Making your account resources available (whether for free or paid) to the general public.

Doesn’t sound that ‘Unlimited’ now, does it?

The right question is not whether it’s really unlimited but whether the user is using it keeping in mind the acceptable use limitations of a shared hosting package. Suppose, you have a standard wordpress website hosted on one of our shared server and there is one of our other customers website hosted on the same shared server having heavy video streaming like youtube which eats up all the resources on the server leaving barely any resource for your wordpress website. This would result in your website going down. We, as your hosting provider, just want to avoid a situation like this and

How do we determine what acceptable use limitations are?
It isn’t an exact science but something we have learnt from years of experience as a Hosting Provider. For example, we’ve determined that anyone using over 20GB of disk space is likely to be using our server as a backup device or to serve video content and such and that is not an acceptable use case for our shared hosting service. We have similar limits for other parameters.

For most users our hosting packages shouldn’t be a problem and our unlimited parameters will never reach its threshold or ‘soft’ limit so to speak. Nonetheless, if you do manage to hit our resource limits while legitimately hosting a website with us feel free to get in touch with us and we will make sure we provide you with the best solution possible!