Unlimited Web Hosting, what's next?

Ok so the industry is back to where it was about 8 years ago, when only a few companies offering unlimited were labeled as "scam". Now 8 years down the road, most of the large companies offering unlimited everything, but everyone is ok with it.
What is next? How will the competition go on?
Examples:
Unlimited + Free 2nd Unlimited account.
Unlimited + Unlimited = Unlimited!!
Unlimited + FREE CASH!
How low can these companies go? How will they keep up the competition since there is no more disk space or bandwidth left to compete on. Maybe start free hosting? Start giving out cash to sign up?
If you look at one of those Top 10 hosting web sites, you will see all the companies listed now offer unlimited everything, just different pricing structure. Since they all offer the same thing, wouldn't the person looking just click on the lowest price? Since most people aren't aware of overselling or the unlimited truth, they see it as something that they will never run out of. Average consumer is not aware of these marketing gimmicks.
Honestly if my cell phone provider was offering unlimited minutes for $45 per month, and another one was offering $100 for 1000 minutes my choice would be unlimited. I would even put up with a little bit of crap from the support for $45 unlimited talk time, and a few service outages.
Just a late night rant





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How low can these companies go? How will they keep up the competition since there is no more disk space or bandwidth left to compete on. Maybe start free hosting? Start giving out cash to sign up?


They are offering web hosting at max for few months. I think that better in vest in current customers to make them more loyal





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I prefer investing in more benefits to give to our clients, rather than spending time planning for all these "unlimited" features and giving money for affiliates..





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I remember a company offering "buy one unlimited, get the second one free" a few years ago.





__________________█ Harzem - Backup Specialist
█ Professional Hosting Website Designer/Developer█ I have hosting domains for sale.

There would be ways to compete. Publish server status and uptime statistics, support statistics (ticket response and final closure), figures of how much some customers are actually able to use from the "unlimited", details on hardware quality/upgrades, hosting platform, custom designed stuff.
Then you have the thing that's already happening: the price war. I've a feeling we'll be seeing all kinds of bogus "specials" as well, and many of the old marketing tricks in the book, fair and unfair.
Quote:


Honestly if my cell phone provider was offering unlimited minutes for $45 per month, and another one was offering $100 for 1000 minutes my choice would be unlimited. I would even put up with a little bit of crap from the support for $45 unlimited talk time, and a few service outages.


Good point. I'm pretty sure many hosting customers feel and do the same.





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I doubt so, as more and more customers become educated with hosting, they'll know to avoid unlimited offers. Perhaps they would advertise "genuine" bandwidth offers while mocking other companies with fake unlimited hosting.

Well if you want to get rid of the smaller unlimited hosts (newer ones who are on reseller accounts, VPS's), just buy a package at their insanely low prices and have a bunch of people upload and download files constantly... use that bandwidth they give you.





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In theory some powerful corporations such as Yahoo should afford to buy expensive equipment and to oversell. But it is the worst example they can give to the industry... and the point is that any web hosting company, not matter how big it is can not afford to oversell.
Hope that the gloomy expectations of many brought by financial crisis would not give more power to unsustainable businesses.





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I think 80% of these companies are just trying to make a quick dollar. offer unlimited everything take the money and run!





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Originally Posted by Zsev


I doubt so, as more and more customers become educated with hosting, they'll know to avoid unlimited offers. Perhaps they would advertise "genuine" bandwidth offers while mocking other companies with fake unlimited hosting.


Not really, this is not going to happen since their uptime work for most of the people. I always repeat the same, but the biggest hosting company in my country have an average of 2/3 downtime per day, every day, however, since they offer a pretty low price, they still get more and more customers every day, hey, for a hobby site, what's the problem of get the site down 30 minutes per day if you pay only $2 per month? most of the people wont pay $10 to get a 99.9% uptime. Many people don't even notice of their downtime either.





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A free domain, backup space and basically pad it out with extras. Then there is the buzz words like clouds, clusters, failovers etc to woo the customer followed by pricing.
Then i guess its just a matter of delivering a quality service to retain your customer base, and maintaining good PR to attract more.





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