Case Study: the Problem With Unlimited Hosting

Hosting accounts are rarely totally unlimited – despite what the blurb says.

In this article, we’ll look at one site that fell foul of vague hosting terminology.

About Frogpants

In July 2010, Frogpants, a network of popular tech-oriented podcasts, went down.

The site was being hosted alongside 13 others on a $7/month ‘unlimited’ hosting account.

Frogpants is a large, bandwidth-intense network. While it was technically within its rights to interpret ‘unlimited’ hosting as unlimited, realistically, it would never have worked out.

Unlimited Means Limited

Frogpants was probably using a fair bit of bandwidth. And to protect its customers, BlueHost simply had to cut it off without warning under the Terms of Service document.

Bluehost found itself in a situation where it had to either anger and disconnect one customer or risk angering countless other customers by letting their service degrade.

Unlimited hosting customers could be cut off due to a range of factors, including:

• High FTP Usage – bandwidth or space.
• Excessive Email Usage – for example, using a low cost shared host for corporate email.
• Violating the ‘Unlimited’ Restriction – when a host says unlimited is OK except for certain activities (like media hosting).

Learning the Lesson

Clearly, anyone who needs unlimited hosting needs to read their hosts’ terms and policies.

Nobody was a winner in this case, but ‘unlimited’ hosting is ingrained in the industry and is unlikely to change.

As such, it’s up to the hosting customer to make sure they understand the limits of ‘unlimited’.