A lot of web hosting companies, including ourselves, make bold claims about offering unlimited web hosting features such as unlimited web space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited databases etc. We see a lot of discussion on forums about what this actually means and questioning how anything can really be unlimited when no one (not even Google or Microsoft) can have an unlimited number of servers to draw power from.
What we mean by unlimited is that we have so many resources at our disposal and we have invested so much money in to our infrastructure that our customers never have to worry about hitting a limit because the allowance available is so large it won’t ever be stretched to breaking point.
Unlike other web hosts our business model is not based around running servers at capacity to wring every last cent out of the bottom line. Why? Because this ignores the unpredictable nature of internet usage. If one customer has a sudden and dramatic spike in traffic it could bring the entire shared server down, affecting hundreds of other customers. We just don’t think it’s worth the risk.
With this in mind, we build in extra capacity in to a server and don’t allow any server to get even near maximum capacity so that no customer can drain a server’s performance levels. The same goes for bandwidth, database servers and mail servers.
Tags: Heart Internet, hosting
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And that’s exactly how it feels as a Heart Internet Reseller. I almost NEVER check how much disk space any of my or my clients’ website are using, or the bandwidth they are eating – although both those stats are readily available to me – because it doesn’t matter to me, nor my clients. It’s just one more thing we do NOT have to worry about. Like any business, I occasionally look around to see if the competition is offering anything better for a similar price. No-one else comes close. But don’t take my word for it; spend some time doing a real comparison of what is really on offer. The peace of mind that GENUINE “unlimited” services offer, is priceless. And yes, these comments are totally independent (apart from me being a Reseller) and unsolicited.
Hi Matthew,
I have been a reseller for a couple of years now, and I am thrilled with every aspect of the service…except one.
Why, oh why is the mailbox limit so small. 400Mb is not a lot these days and I have had so many customers wanting to upgrade their mailbox size, all happy to pay for it, but its not possible. I have clients that send and receive some large attachements and its a little embarrassing when they can get 2-4Gb storage from throw-a-way e-mail accounts, but I can only offer them 400Mb….
Why is the limit so small, and why can we not pay for larger mailboxes?
Steve
What happend to my comment…we are not censoring constructive criticisim are we Heart?
Steve
No, just a busy Monday morning
One of our strengths here is whilst we are always moving forward and adding more features, we do this with out ignoring the existing ones. Granted, you can’t currentlly send files in the Gb range, but our mailbox quota is one of the biggest for a UK web host, we did a comparison in this post http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/blog/2009/11/heart-internet-email-upgraded/ and it has quadrupled in under a year.
Cheers
Matt
The ‘Unlimited’ term is much more than just an advertising term to me as a Heart Internet Reseller. There ARE really limits, but just the limits all the shared hosting services have. Unlimited accounts have always been real unlimited to me without reducing any of my or my customers’ desires to a cheap service.
Cheers Matt, hope great success for all of us!
I suppose it depends entirely on your site(s), are they dynamic (PHP/MySQL) or static (HTML)? There is surely a limit because of resource usage, there’s probably some fineprint in the TOS?