Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : The Unlimited issue...

[B_Birmingham]

Anyone who has read this forum, or other forums like this, has quickly realized that there is no such thing as Unlimited Bandwidth or Diskspace.

However, I was wondering what your thoughts were on other "Unlimited" features, such as e-mail addresses, subdomains, etc...

[3en]

I see no problem with offering unlimited features. Well, as long as the client goes mad and creates 5,000 pop3 accounts to hog the server.

[phatmass]

Originally posted by 3en
I see no problem with offering unlimited features. Well, as long as the client goes mad and creates 5,000 pop3 accounts to hog the server.

Well, if it's "unlimited", then shouldn't it be their right to do so? If not, then why advertise as such?

[B_Birmingham]

it would be unlimited so they could do that, however, I doubt they would be able to use ALL of their e-mail accounts without going over their bandwidth limit.

[FNAHOST]

Imagine the amount of time a user would have to spend to create 5000 email accounts. Whew! Their account would probably expire before they were done.

[Dynanet]

Nothing really wrong with unlimited features as in most cases they'd be restricted by the allotted space/bandwidth. Hosts really need to keep reasonable limits for some things though.

Offering 5GB of space and 50GB bandwidth with unlimited email action is asking for trouble, I know of a couple of ISPs who could easily remain within those resources limits but would have 1000+ email addresses, I guarantee it would be the only thing the server would have time to handle if there was AV and SpamAssassin checks happening on top of the POP3/IMAP/Webmail action.

As with any host offering "unlimited" anything they are playing the numbers game on the assumption most clients would never use the full resources supplied.

Some unlimited features won't take up much resources at all though.

[Ethical Network]

I dont see any problem with offering unlimited features. After all, what are the chances of ever getting a client that is going to use say more then;

100 MySQL
500 Emails
50 Sub-Domains

Pretty rare I would say.

[Douglas]

I actually make it a point to note that while there are some features that can be consider to be "Unlimited", it's still limited in the sense of your total bandwidht and disk usage. I think that once you convey that message to people, they'll have a better understanding of what unlimited means.