It has become a common practice in the web hosting industry to come across companies that promise unlimited disk space and bandwidth to clients. It is important to take these promises with a pinch of salt because the word ‘unlimited’ comes with many qualifiers, especially if you take the time to go through the fine print. When a web hosting company claims to offer unlimited bandwidth, what they really mean is that you can use bandwidth incrementally and within the range that the hosting company can acquire. Clearly, the hosting provider would not be able to sustain its business if every client demands unlimited bandwidth or disk space.
To protect their interests, web hosting companies take unlimited disk space and bandwidth to mean an unspecified volume of space to be used at first, which can be increased as the client’s needs grow. The tricky part is that the web hosting company will not disclose the unspecified amount at the time of subscription. The amount of disk space allocated initially is arbitrarily chosen by the company. What this means for the client is that they may not even be aware when they have exceeded their allocated disk space. This gives the web hosting company the power to hold the client liable for breaching the contract or charging additional fees for the excess disk space.
Some web hosting companies even restrict clients in how they use the disk space that has been allocated to them. For example, the company may stipulate that a client only use the disk space for hosting a website and not for keeping data backup or any other resource. Another trick that web hosting companies frequently use to avoid being sued for false advertising is to present available disk space in terabytes. This should ring alarm bells for prospective clients since this usually means that the company will impose some restrictions on disk space usage in future.
In addition to promising unlimited disk space, some companies also promise unlimited bandwidth. This is clearly unbelievable because no web hosting can expect to provide high speed connectivity by offering unlimited bandwidth to clients, especially with shared server hosting. If clients are led on to believe that unlimited bandwidth is available, the bandwidth is likely to become clogged up with tons of data packets. The problem is even more acute if the clients use the unlimited bandwidth to host large static websites. This is a huge problem because the service quality becomes negatively affected for all clients on the shared server.
If, however, you have few options other than signing up with a web hosting company that promises unlimited disk space and bandwidth, you need to use the disk space cleverly. For instance, if you are someone who creates and manages multiple websites, you can use these companies to host websites that generate less traffic or those that are still in the developmental or beta stage. When these sites begin to generate greater traffic, you can easily move them on to hosting companies that offer more reasonable and efficient disk space.
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