Quite often while searching around for new web hosting you may come across companies offering unlimited parts of the service that they are offering, for example they may advertise as being able to provide you unlimited bandwidth monthly or even unlimited space and often this will be suggested at quite a low monthly fee too.

This does not mean that the webhost is trying to trick you into thinking that they can offer an unlimited package for a tiny fee, because if you read the terms of service at the company website it will likely tell you that in so many words they cant actually provide you with unlimited bandwidth as common sense tells us that someone has to pay for that bandwidth, and if they are only charging you a small fee then its obvious that the service cannot be unlimited.

What it does do is it gets your attention, and to an individual who may have never using a web hosting service before this will naturally look very appealing and theres a chance that a new user may not read through the available small print that most of us sometimes neglect to read properly.

I have chosen not to suggest that the web hosting companies are trying to trick you or lie to you because the web hosting business is a rather competitive market and in order to try and stand out from the other competitors they are going to want to grab your attention and they know that the word "unlimited" is definately going to get your attention and that it may lead to a new customer for them.

What you need to make a habit of doing when you are searching for a new hosting service is to read the TOS ( terms of service ) and look for all of the realistic expectations and limits that you would expect from a service where they are only chaging you a small fee, and then ask yourself if any web hosting company could really offer you an unlimited service.

A web hosting company knows that a percentage of its customers would not come even close to being heavy users of their resources and will most likely use just a small amount of space and not a lot of bandwidth but then there are always users that do have very busy websites and that are resource heavy and its quite unlikely that a web hosting company could allow a customer to hammer their services and the service being truely unlimited.

So basically its a bit of common sense to weigh up what you could realistically expect from the service you are paying for and that at some point there has to be a limit set on all services offered.

Filed under: General Web Hosting Info by admin Published May 30, 2008