If you’ve done any research on hosting plans you’ve seen the deals: unlimited domains, unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, only $4.95 per month. And these are major firms, not fly-by-night unknown companies.
So how do they do it? Most of them are willing to give you unlimited everything as long as you don’t try to use it. We worked with a client last month who was moving three large business sites to a cheap hosting plan to save money. Before we got the second site moved over the host was already “throttling” her account due to load. Her $4/mo plan includes unlimited bandwidth, but when she exceeded their “standard bandwidth” they began “throttling” her sites. Throttling is where they temporarily make your site unavailable for a few seconds at a time to keep the load averages down.
If you are a casual blogger with a site about the health benefits of organic turnips, you probably never will experience throttling, and if you do, your readers will wait a few extra seconds when your site slows down. But if you are a business running ecommerce, having your site slowed down or taken off the air for a few seconds at a time is a much more serious issue.
Most firms who offer unlimited disk space still track the number of files or total disk space and will take your site off the air if you exceed their unwritten limited. We have worked with several clients who have paid us to remove extra files from their sites so their hosts would put them back on the air.
Most hosting firms don’t backup accounts that have exceeded their acceptable disk space limits.
Several cheap hosting firms run outdated versions of the operating system and database software making it impossible to run a current version of WordPress. This leaves you open to hacking.
What to do? First, realize you rarely can get unlimited everything for a cheap price. Quality hosting has limits and still costs more than $5/mo. Nobody really needs unlimited disk space, or bandwidth — at least for legal purposes. Be prepared to pay for better hosting and pay for what you need. You invest a lot of time and money in your website, don’t let it be ruined trying to save a few hundred dollars a year in hosting.