So, just a short question, is going the unlimited hosting route generally more profitable than having limited accounts?

Yes actually it is more profitable. I use to do that but I have decided metered is the best way to go since people dont abuse it as much. When I was offering unlimited 80% of my client abused it with spam, rapidshare premium link generator, phptorrent, and illegal files.

The way it works is their point of entry into a user purchasing hosting is usually higher than other hosts. So rather than the lowest plan being $4/month it's now $8/month. So assuming they still get users who use very little it works out quite well. Obviously they can run into a problem user but it's all about the percentages. One in say 100 users abuses the service they may just be able to eat that users cost due to the other 99 users using more reasonable amounts.

The way it works is their point of entry into a user purchasing hosting is usually higher than other hosts. So rather than the lowest plan being $4/month it's now $8/month. So assuming they still get users who use very little it works out quite well. Obviously they can run into a problem user but it's all about the percentages. One in say 100 users abuses the service they may just be able to eat that users cost due to the other 99 users using more reasonable amounts.

How about client draw rather than profit? Do you draw more clients when offering unlimited services? I was thinking about opening another host as an experiment with the unlimited deal.

How about client draw rather than profit? Do you draw more clients when offering unlimited services? I was thinking about opening another host as an experiment with the unlimited deal.

You draw alot of 1 month customers who are just their for 1 month and alot of yearly customers

I definitely don't have demographics data laid out before me or anything, but I can say that the educated web hosting consumer will be instantly turned off by any "unlimited" offer. What percentage of the market, or of your niche, this educated consumer is is anybody's guess.

You'll probably also get a lot of incredibly obvious "How Do I" questions since your customer base will not be internet savvy, and you better always be around to answer them, lest that one customer come and complain on a forum like WHT, saying something like, "STAY AWAY -- 12 Hour Ticket Response!" Also, if you do have to cancel accounts because of high resource usage those customers will probably try to trash you as well. Guess that comes with the territory of false advertising.

I can say that the educated web hosting consumer will be instantly turned off by any "unlimited" offer.

I wouldn't say so - I think thats a lot of an exaggeration. I would consider myself an 'educated' web hosting consumer - I've worked in web-hosting for several years now (and not just for myself) and made many many many hosting purchases.

My most recent purchase was with HostGator - on one of their 'Unlimited' Storage and Transfer plans. I didn't hesitate for a second and I'm very happy with the plan. :)

You'll probably also get a lot of incredibly obvious "How Do I" questions since your customer base will not be internet savvy, and you better always be around to answer them, lest that one customer come and complain on a forum like WHT, saying something like, "STAY AWAY -- 12 Hour Ticket Response!" Also, if you do have to cancel accounts because of high resource usage those customers will probably try to trash you as well. Guess that comes with the territory of false advertising.

Well no matter your prices or offering you're eventually going to get less internet savvy users. So I don't see how unlimited really matters there. I think once these users figure things out they're really awesome. Very little usage while paying a premium. They could fit on 1GB of space on a much cheaper account.

As far as accounts using high amounts of resource usage. These happen at any host it has nothing to do with false advertising. You read about hosts offering 50GB of bandwidth and booting users for excessive resource usage. We see more posts here because of the pure size of the big ones. If one of these big ones were offering limited resources you'd still see the same sort of posts about being booted.

So, just a short question, is going the unlimited hosting route generally more profitable than having limited accounts?

In a way, it can be as profitable as you want it to be, because resources abuse thresholds are typically not mentioned explicitly, or even if they are, there's a broadly worded clause as well, letting you, the host, be the one to decide what's too much and what isn't. So, you can set it for yourself that you need to have 100, 200, or 500 accounts per server to make the profit level that you're after. Any user that makes it hard or impossible to reach and maintain that level is then a valid candidate for upgrade or account termination. That's how it usually is.

Now, if all you have is a server with 2TB of data transfer, selling "unlimited bandwidth" may even put you at a slight competitive disadvantage given that at the big hosts out there the amount of data transfer usage in itself that wouldn't be a problem at all (due to the law of big numbers coming into play), and word could get out that you're actually pretty strict on bandwidth usage.

Hi,

I'd think that you'd find unlimited hosting only works well when you have a large amount of customers. The reason being is that you'll have a greater standard deviation in the amount of resources used if your sample size is small.

Most hosting providers cut off people that intend to make the most of their unlimited plan by:
Limiting file size
Limiting the number of files
Requiring that the files be site related e.g. no backups, movies, music.

Tell you the truth, I don't think it is, When you go unlimited people are going to abuse your servers and make you work hard on stooping them, The servers might start over selling most companies that offer unlimited now oversell it also sometimes make your site look in a bad way because people will think you oversell and you aren't its like people jude you in a more different way.