This is a common question we get asked all the time here at GlowHost.

Let me start off by saying, Unlimited Hosting plans are NOT the best…at least if we are talking about performance. If we are talking about price, then it could be argued that unlimited has a fair shot at the title of “best hosting.”

“Well, how could it be?” one might ask. People often think to themselves, “I see a low-price package with unlimited disk space and unlimited domains, what could possibly be better? After all, those other shared web hosting packages cost more, and have limitations on disk space and bandwidth.”

Lets pretend that you wanted to buy a value meal at your favorite burger joint. You were looking at the menu and saw that they sold value meals for what appeared to be very similar burgers, fries, and a cola, yet they offered these meal deals at 2 different prices.  The sign says: “Special! $2.99 for a burger, fries and cola.”  You look at the menu again and see another special which costs $4.99, but you notice that the more expensive meal looks a little smaller, in fact, it is only a quarter-pound of “all beef goodness” when the $2.99 burger is the clear winner with the half-pound gut-buster.

After repeatedly shopping at the same burger joint for some period of time, you decide to splurge a little bit and try the more expensive burger. “Wow! This is yummy!” you think to yourself, “I wonder what is different?” So you ask the cashier for their nutritional information card (because that’s what we all do when we eat fast food). After inspecting the ingredients, you realize that the $2.99 gut buster is made with “Meat Product” which by law is only required to be 45% REAL meat.

Then you look at the information for the $4.99 burger and see that it is 100% Kobe beef. Now the price difference becomes clear to you. Is one more healthy than the other? I have no clue, ask the FDA (as if they know anything), but at least in my own somewhat twisted mind, I’m going with the Kobe beef just on the fact that the thought of “Meat Product” is fairly disturbing on its own.

As consumers, we are trained at an early age that more for less, equals better, and virtually none of us read the fine print.

More for less is almost never the case with web hosting, and people never reading the fine print is virtually every hosting consumer, except those who have been burned in the past and who are now trained to look for this very important document. With web hosting, in general, you get what you pay for.

Lets look at a typical start-up web site scenario. Most people do not want to spend a lot of money on their hosting bills. This is completely understandable since there are lots of unknown factors.

“How long is the site going to take to build, how much is it going to cost to build, why should I pay $20/mo when I can pay $3/mo, will I like this hosting company, and will I even be in business this time next year?”

If you have asked yourself some or all of these questions, then you are not alone. Considering most people have the same questions you do, and the same mentality that I described above (about more for less being better), then most people do the seemingly logical thing and spend the least amount of money on a hosting package that gives them everything including the kitchen sink.

At GlowHost, we fought for many years as advocates against “Unlimited” hosting in any form. However, due to the way the industry has shifted over the last several years, we were forced to make a business decision, which involved us offering unlimited plans to remain competitive and to retain our existing customer base.  The difference at GlowHost is we try to present the facts about unlimited hosting front and center. For example, we have a full page unlimited hosting FAQ on the main web site about what unlimited really means, our Terms of Service also cite specific details about what is allowed, or not allowed, and from time to time, you might even see blog posts like this, where we try to educate our consumers about what they can expect with a shared unlimited package.

Unlimited hosting, by nature will have more reliability issues than traditional shared web hosting, due to the nature of the unlimited beast. As a web host, we never know for example, when someone who shares the server is going to bog down or crash a shared server when they test out their badly coded scripts. We never know when someone will decide that during peak traffic hours on Monday morning, that it seems to be a good idea to try and send out a few thousand emails to a list of email addresses they just purchased for $29.95.  We’ll never know know if little Johnny got bored of his web site and hasn’t patched his WordPress software in 12 months, which ended up getting hacked. We don’t know about any of this until after the fact, which is when we can react and try to save the servers from a disastrous downward spiral that slows down performance or can even take the server offline temporarily.

Now, guess which web site demographic has the most incidents involved with causing these types of issues? If you guessed sites that utilize Unlimited Hosting packages, you win the prize!

I will explain what I mean in more detail in this article that will outline your typical unlimited hosting customer, their behaviors, motives and how these can affect the reliability of your web site.

Now tell us what you think about this post. Please leave a comment below.