Information About Unlimited Hosting Services

Contracts not read by users, server systems where infrastructure planning cannot be done, arguments about “but it was supposed to be unlimited” and disappointments. In this blog post written for informational purposes about unlimited hosting services, we will share with you the important notes you need to know.

If you are undecided in choosing web hosting, please read this blog post all the way to the end without a break so that your business continuity is not interrupted.

Our company Netinternet removed its Unlimited or Unlimited Hosting services from service in 2017 after providing them for a long time, and has now begun providing hosting services with packages that have defined limits. In this article, we will share with you what has happened to us with “Unlimited” or “Boundless” or “Unlimited” (absolutely the same meaning…) Hosting service and why we no longer provide this service. You may find this blog post unethical given that we currently do not provide web hosting service without limits and because we provided this service in the past. First of all, let us emphasize that our aim is not to defame/slander companies offering such services, and that this service was also offered by our company at one time!

The purpose of these types of hosting services is to ensure that users receive service without quota concerns. Thus, the user quickly chooses between services and purchases a service. Unlimited hosting is misunderstood by many users. Because it is unlimited, they think they can put terabyte-sized files and consume terabyte-sized traffic in a hosting service with an average price between 50 and 100 USD. However, this is not the case. In services without limit positioning, the limit is limited according to the fair use quota known as AKK, which is very well known by today’s home internet users. While this is clearly stated in the usage agreements of companies that do their job professionally, the AKK here is implied and stated in a gray area.

Since there is no organization that measures the quality of the service given by hosting companies and audits them, this topic is incredibly open to abuse. Generally, there are contract clauses about the files in your FTP account consisting of files necessary for a website to work. According to these clauses, using your FTP account as a file repository is prohibited. The most clear measure regarding fair use begins with a limit called Inode. Inode can be described as a database that stores information about each file in the file system, storing the modification dates of files, user ownership, access permissions. It can also roughly be described as the number of files. This limit is valid and fixed for each hard disk. Without this limit, the server administrator could never back up the system quickly. Even incremental backups of servers with high Inode limits can reach durations exceeding a week. In this state, since the backup process affects the read/write performance of the hard disk until it is complete, it can cause web sites running on the server to work at an unbearable slowness. At the same time, as I mentioned, since Inode has a fixed size valid for each hard disk, when the Inode limit is reached, no new file can be written even though there is free disk space on the hard disk. This is the worst case scenario; database service, folders where temporary files are created, session records, everything closes at once and becomes non-functional. Since nobody would want this, in services where disk quota is given as unlimited, Inode is given as limited. When we look at it, we generally see that these kinds of limits are only in the contract. Since this limit is generally not mentioned in the service package features, those who hit the Inode limit experience great surprise by saying “but my service was supposed to be unlimited.”

First of all, we thought it would not be necessary to state anywhere in the blog post that there is no technology in the world with unlimited internet bandwidth and similarly unlimited size hard disks, so we did not write it.

Continuing with what we have to say, the dangers in unlimited hosting service are not limited to these. (Danger; are the errors that may arise as a result of giving some resources as unlimited in the unlimited service.) Servers will never work within a standard for the given service. While disk quota is 60% empty and internet bandwidth is at 80% in some servers, disk quota may be 95% and bandwidth may not even be 10% in some servers. In this case, making future-oriented resource planning becomes extremely impossible. As these plans are made only approximately, when the business providing the service starts losing money from OverSelling (we will discuss this in detail shortly) in some servers, it starts moving hosting accounts with high resource usage on servers from one server to another. This is a situation that disrupts business continuity and can even cause data loss due to the timeout experienced during the transition between two servers when DNS records change and TTL periods. In situations that will affect general user services, the inter-server transfer process is started and completed immediately, at that moment, without the knowledge of the web hosting owner. Since no notification is given, you may notice a problem very late. Perhaps the damage may have already been done.

So why are all these headaches tolerated? The answer is: for high levels of OverSelling revenue. What is OverSelling? In the service sector, it is the continuation of sales to a certain extent after reaching the sales limit of intangible goods without ending the sale. You can take your mobile phone tariff as an example. A service for which 10 units are paid and which sells 1000 minutes in every direction only allows 1000 minutes of use for the current month, and when you make 200 minutes of use at the end of the month, your unused 800 minutes will not be carried over to the next month. This is an example of OverSelling. It is a method of generating revenue from unused resources frequently used in IT, telecommunications, and internet fields.

Hosting companies aim to generate revenue with the maximum OverSelling ratio in unlimited hosting service. In this case, hosting the maximum number of accounts on servers is the commercial priority of companies, and so they strive to push users with high traffic and disk usage out of their system as soon as possible. Returning to the beginning of our article, since there is no organization that audits or measures hosting companies, with the gray areas in contracts, your service can be terminated when you least expect it. In this case, you will have disrupted your established order and business continuity once again and will be forced to look for a new hosting and transfer your data. A complete waste of time!

As a result, at the end of this article about unlimited hosting targeting users to receive service without quota concerns, you may have developed different concerns about your business continuity beyond quota concerns. In order not to use a service full of surprises and to maintain your business continuity at the highest level, we recommend choosing hosting packages with defined limits where you definitely know what you are buying and that do not have gray contracts or hidden and secret rules.

One of the main reasons for removing the unlimited hosting service in 2017, in addition to the topics mentioned above, was that it was a service inconsistent with our company’s vision/mission which values business continuity and transparency, and we removed it thinking it was a service that damaged our company’s commercial reputation since it could not be correctly resource-planned and was misunderstood by dissatisfied users.

Abdullah Altunbaş

Content Writer

Netinternet Bilişim Teknolojileri A.Ş.'de teknik konularda liderlik yapıyorum. 15 yıldır bu alanda çalışıyorum ve özellikle sistem yönetimi, ağ teknolojileri ve yazılım geliştirme konularına odaklanıyorum.