What is unlimited web hosting?
When looking for a web hosting provider you might have come across web hosting providers offering unlimited hosting – so, what does unlimited really mean? We will explain the fundamentals of unlimited hosting and why we offer it.
Generally, the term unlimited hosting refers to a web hosting service, that offers unlimited disk storage, unlimited bandwidth, and even add-on domain capacity. Unlimited hosting service providers offer the flexibility to host multiple websites and domains on a single hosting account at a reasonable cost.
Unlimited website hosting providers generally offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space, allowing users to upload as much data as they want and to allow high volumes of traffic, without having to worry about exceeding their monthly allocation. This type of hosting is perfect for users who essentially don’t want to have to worry about the limitations of storage or bandwidth as their website or business scales.
What is Unlimited Disk Space?
Unlimited storage, also known as unlimited disk space, allows you to add as much content and pages to your website as you wish, without being charged extra fees by your web host provider (although it’s always a good idea to check the fine print). In recent years unlimited storage has increasingly become a common practice among web hosts, though not universally offered.
In the case of hosting plans that include unlimited disk space, when disk space is nearing its capacity, additional disk drives should be added to the server to increase storage space and avoid disruption. Unlimited storage may be more accurately described as unlimited storage available (or, largely scalable beyond the point of storage being a concern).
If you are planning on hosting a lot of videos, some unlimited hosting plans limit the file size. For example, if you are running a video-sharing website and require hundreds of gigabytes of space, unlimited shared web hosting won’t be appropriate for your case.
It’s important to point out that in almost all cases, providers who offer unlimited hosting do so on the basis of fair usage – the truth is, storage is expensive, and there are certain scenarios where it just isn’t feasible to allow an ‘infinite’ amount of storage for a single account.
What is Unlimited Bandwidth?
Unlimited bandwidth is a term used to describe the ability of a hosting company to provide its customers with an uninterrupted flow of data. While this term is often used to describe the bandwidth of a hosting server, it can also refer to the bandwidth of an entire network. The term can be used to describe a variety of hosting services, including those that offer unlimited data transfer speeds or those that provide unlimited storage space.
All our hosting plans (yes all of them!) Include unlimited Bandwidth free of charge.
How Much Bandwidth and Disk Space Do I Really Need?
The amount of bandwidth you need depends on the number of visitors that visit your website. It’s only websites that are expected to produce a significant amount of traffic that will require a more substantial rate of monthly bandwidth. In most cases, these are usually image-driven or video-streaming websites.
On Average, 99% of websites currently on the web use no more than 5 GB of bandwidth a month.
Disk space is measured in megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB), or terabytes (TB). People often ask questions like, “is 20 GB of storage space enough for my website?”. Finding the accurate amount of storage, you need for your website is an in-depth process, but it primarily depends on the number of pages on your site and how big each page is.
Many ‘unlimited web hosting’ providers will offer unlimited disk space as part of the service.
However, the truth is that most websites really don’t use all that much space! It’s this reason that ‘unlimited web hosting’ actually works – do hosting providers make money from clients on a £3.95 plan with 100GB of data? Probably not! However, the ‘law of averages’ tends to balance things back out, whereby the majority of those with unlimited hosting actually just use it for the ‘convenience’ of not having to scale their plan as they grow.
If your website becomes too busy with file uploads and downloads, shared web hosting will quickly run out of resources and trigger an alert to your web hosting provider. Some web hosts will suspend or terminate an account if you are hosting a heavy-traffic site.
There are always scenarios where ‘unlimited’ becomes unpractical of course – as websites and businesses grow, they don’t just grow in ‘size’ of storage, but would eventually require more resources such as RAM and CPU. Or alternatively, a website may just demand something a little more bespoke.
Can you build the next ‘Amazon’, ‘Ebay’ or ‘Facebook’ on an unlimited hosting plan? Nope, that just isn’t realistic! These companies invest thousands (sometimes millions) on hosting infrastructure – so surpassing the capabilities of an unlimited web hosting plan certainly can happen!
This is why shared hosting is not recommended for all types of websites, we recommended upgrading to VPS hosting or dedicated server as the more appropriate web hosting choice.
What is an unlimited domain reseller?
An unlimited domain reseller hosting plan allows you to host unlimited domains! For example, our Reseller Pro plans offer a fixed number of cPanel users, whereas each of those individual accounts can host as many domains as you wish.
However, hosting unlimited domains within a single cPanel account does come with some limitations. For example, there is a significant security risk when all sites on the account sit within a single cPanel user – if one gets breached, they all could potentially get infected!
If you are a single business, hosting just websites for yourself (and not clients), then unlimited hosting can be ideal, as it offers you the ability to host all of your websites within a single cPanel account.
However, if you are a business looking to host websites for multiple clients, the ideal solution is a ‘reseller hosting‘ plan. Reseller hosting allows you to host a number of ‘accounts’, with you having centralised access to them all. From there, each account is isolated from one another from a security perspective and provides the ideal solution when you need to grant access to your clients.
So, is unlimited hosting really ‘unlimited‘?
When web hosting providers provide “unlimited” space, they often have restrictions on what you can use the disk space for. This is needed because if every user really uses their “unlimited” space, the host will have to spend a substantial amount of money to buy more servers to provide space for them. As such, if you look at the Terms of Service (TOS) agreements of web hosts providing either unlimited space or incredibly huge amounts of disk space (such as those providing hundreds of gigabytes or even thousands), you will notice that you cannot use the space for any purpose you choose.
In most cases, their condition is that the space can be used only for the website. You cannot, for example, use the space as a sort of offsite backup space for your home or office computer. You must abide by our fair use of service policy. Hosting providers that specify a realistic amount of disk space for each customer (20GB, 40GB etc) usually don’t need such restrictions. You are allowed to use the disk space in any way you wish.
To summarise – if you use the service sensibly, then absolutely. It’s ‘unlimited’ in terms of general or generic usage, but there are always ‘some’ limitations to look into through terms of service to prevent abuse. If you want to host websites for yourself or for clients and just don’t want the worry about having to scale your storage, then just being sensible will generally keep you clear of those terms either way.
What is overselling?
Overselling is a term used when a hosting provider sells more bandwidth and disk space than they physically have. Most websites will not use all the resources allocated by their provider, leaving the provider with leftover bandwidth and space each month. Providers sometimes take a risk by selling the leftover space to other customers to maximize profits.
Large hosting companies normally own incomprehensible amounts of hosting capacity that would never be exceeded by a single website. At the same time, most websites only need very few resources to run daily, such as the average corporate website.
Acceptable Fair Use Policy
We talked briefly about acceptable usage policies. So, what exactly is acceptable usage?
While every web hosting provider will have differing restrictions on what they define as acceptable usage, web hosting companies will include an acceptable usage policy within their terms and conditions of service.
This will often include limits on the about of CPU processing the site can use or the number of inodes (a limit on the number of individual files that can be stored). it is crucial to read all the terms thoroughly before signing up.
Check out our fair usage of service policy
NVMe Unlimited Hosting
We offer unlimited hosting on our new NVMe servers. This high-performance, ultra-reliable servers provide up to 20x speed and performance over traditional hard disk drives, while also offering advanced scalability for current and future performance.
The power for these upgrades comes from new hosting accounts being provisioned on NVMe servers as opposed to SATA-powered boxes. NVMe radically increases data transfer speeds. Faster hardware means your website runs faster on the front end and the administrative side, resulting in a better experience for you and your visitors.
We have provided a full breakdown of the benefits of our infrastructure here.
Unlimited Email Hosting
When a hosting plan mentions emails as a specification, it is generally referring to the number of email accounts that can be created, not the number of emails you can send or store. Plans with unlimited emails are usually featured along with unlimited domains and storage.
Can I offer unlimited hosting to my clients?
Yes, it’s possible to offer unlimited web hosting if you choose us for hosting solutions.
To do this, you would purchase a reseller hosting plan, which would allow you to create cPanel accounts for your clients. Each of those client accounts can, if you wish, have unlimited storage, bandwidth, etc available.
Please note, this is available on our Reseller Pro 50 and above, which starts at just £24.95 per month.
Conclusion
The features listed in web hosting packages seemingly provide information about the disk space and bandwidth limits of every account. Modern websites, however, often encounter hidden limits not mentioned in the list provided by web hosts. More so than ever, these resource limits are proving to be the real limits that websites encounter today. Understanding these limits will help you better evaluate web hosts and plan for your website.
If you want a good unlimited provider, look for these qualities:
White label hosting: This means the company will allow you to put your own logo on the product. We offer completely white-label hosting, so you will have full control of your hosting.
Customer support: That way, you’ll have someone to talk to if anything goes wrong. Look for a company that offers 24/7 support, even if you choose their cheapest plan. The Brixly team is always available 24/7, we often reply to customers within 15 minutes.
High uptime: Your customers won’t stick around if their websites keep going down when they host them on your servers, so choose a reseller hosting plan that gives you at least 99% uptime. We offer 99.9% uptime guarantee, our servers are pretty much always running.
