Dangers of Offering Unlimited Disk Space and Bandwidth

Web hosting companies offering unlimited disk space and bandwidth as parts of their plans still exist, despite numerous companies going down under as a result of offering impossible services. Selling unlimited disk space and bandwidth as a marketing gimmick does not work, because it is not a sustainable service and causes financial troubles for a web host that is unable to profit. Think about how it would affect you in the long-term and financially before attempting to sell unlimited disk space and bandwidth on your hosting plans

Web hosts offering unlimited disk space and/or bandwidth are not practical or realistic. Offering impossible is not possible, unless you have found a way to defy physics. A server with a 160GB hard drive has an obvious space limit – 160GB. This does not include the basic setup files, Apache, CPanel and everything else required for the server to be operational for hosting services. Therefore, offering unlimited disk space is physically impossible. Offering unlimited data or bandwidth transfer is equally impossible, especially if you are leasing a dedicated server from a datacenter that caps a servers data transfer at 2000 GB a month.

Customers will take advantage of the offer, especially entertainment blogs or popular message boards. You as the web host will be responsible for delivering promised services, while the customer’s website eats up CPU and memory resources. Server overloads, Apache crashes and downtime can result from hosting websites that expect unlimited access to bandwidth usage. Suspending or refusing to render further service to the said customer would then cause them to post negative and public reviews about your services. Thus, offering unlimited disk space and bandwidth for the sake of getting more customers turns potential buyers away as they are reading bad reviews of your web hosting service.

Moving a high resource usage customer to a different server is not ideal, as customers are frequently opposed to changes. Their claim will be that they purchased and have been paying for “unlimited services”, therefore services should be properly rendered without penalization.

Causes potential customers to question your business practices. A customer will read “unlimited disk space and bandwidth” which will immediately trigger a “this is a scam” flag. They will also be discouraged from buying by their friends, who may have had a bad experience from a different unlimited host.

Bottom line; It looks bad for the industry. Offering impossible for nothing looks bad for the entire web hosting industry, causing customers to suspect the worst from honest web hosting business owners.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 5:50 am and is filed under How-To's. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.