Price. Features. Customer service. Disk space. Bandwidth. There are many factors to consider with web hosting. Many of the web hosting services competitive efforts often make it hard to distinguish between them. Bandwidth and disk space are a prime example. As some web hosts began to offer ridiculous amounts of bandwidth or disk space, recognizing that the vast majority of shared hosting users will never use up that much. Not to lose out on this profitable proclamation, the other web hosting services would quickly follow suit and raise their bandwidth or disk space offers to beat out their competitor. Eventually the figures were reaching so high, they reached infinity.

Infinity being “unlimited”, as many hosts now claimed “unlimited” disk space and bandwidth, quickly followed by a note in their terms of service that gives them the right to cancel or otherwise deal with users who exceed a “reasonable” amount of usage. In many terms of service for various hosts who offer “unlimited” disk space or bandwidth, they claim it is unlimited until it causes disruptions of service for other users.

Such vagueness gives them the right to cancel users for even the smallest infractions. Charges have been levied against almost all “unlimited” web hosts for cancelling users they said were using too much. Too much of something supposedly unlimited. That means they indeed have limits. One voice of reason among the “unlimited” offerers seems to be Hostgator, who, has visible monitors for clients in their cPanels of how much bandwidth and processing they are using, and has it “recommend” that they stay under 25% usage of the server’s resources. However, upon reaching it, their staff does not take the approach of many other web hosts and just cancel the package, instead they try to negotiate and reason with the offending user. After all, it is a bit ridiculous to use half of a high-powered server for a mere ten dollars a month, and at that point if their business is not generating enough revenue to afford a dedicated server to manage the traffic, that business model would definitely not have the level of profitability to be sustainable in the long run.

In conclusion, this madness of the “unlimited” claims in the industry has led to many confusing situations. A few voices of reason can be heard, but for the most part, the web hosts who claim to offer such things have been caught up in “bandwidth wars” in the style of the price wars of old.