Unlimited hosting — is it possible?

The phrase "unlimited hosting" appears more and more often on the sites of hosting companies. 

Is that possible? Let us try to work it out. 

A hosting server, like any other computer, has a set of basic resources — disk space, memory, computing power and so on. Of course a server is more powerful than an ordinary computer and it has quite a lot of these resources. And now let us try to imagine that we really do sell them without limit.

Hosting with unlimited space. 

There are many disks in a server, they are quite capacious and expensive. But if unlimited disk space is sold to one customer, everybody ends up deceived: at some moment that customer will not be able to add new data to their site, because the space on the server will physically run out.

The other customers will not be able to place anything at all, since all the space has been taken by the first customer, and the host will sell the resources of a whole server to one customer for a sum many times smaller than the cost of keeping the server in a data centre. 

That is why the contracts for an unlimited hosting service (which few people read) usually say in small print: no more than such and such a number of files may be placed, files must be no larger than such and such a size and so on — the unlimited offer turns out on inspection to have limits.

Hosting with an unlimited number of sites. 

For the server every site is a set of files on a disk and a certain number of lines in the server's configuration files. 

The larger the size of the configuration files, the longer the changes will take to apply.

For instance, if there are 3,000 sites on the server, the 3,001st will be added over as much as several minutes, during which the first 3,000 sites may be unavailable. 

Of course, few people will like it when sites are unavailable because of a neighbour on the server who keeps adding a large number of sites. And that neighbour is hardly likely to like it either when the host, referring to a suitable clause of the contract, suspends the service and demands a move to a VPS or a dedicated server, to place anything they like there.

So unlimited sites are no more than marketing either. 

Hosting with unlimited traffic. 

The only parameter that can be truly unlimited. The times when internet channels were sold with payment for traffic are long gone, so a hosting company may quite well offer customers traffic without limits. 

As even such a small analysis shows, a hosting service cannot be truly unlimited by its very nature. 

We have, however, designed our hosting plans in such a way that our customers' projects feel good and comfortable on them, that the declared resources are always available and that such a service does not cost much.