I know that one of the biggest changes i have seen in the web hosting service industry over the past few years is the rise of the “all you can eat” pricing structure. What i mean by this is hosting accounts that allow you to host an unlimited number of domains and also give you unlimited data transfer. I can say that this has been a big shift in the pricing structure in a number of ways as i remember the days when you literally bought a hosting account that hosted a specific number of domains, like 14! Now thanks to the falling prices of both disk space and data transfer its possible to get some really cheap accounts where you can do have all you space and transfer you need. The prices are really pretty good to, i was looking at an American host the other day that was coming in at only £15 for unlimited transfer and domains.
I know at this point alot of people are probably thinking that they probably don’t need unlimited transfer and they only have around 5 sites at the moment. This may be true but one of the best things about this time of hosting service is it means you don’t have to worry about space or transfer anymore, you really will never have to check you bandwidth log again! This can also prove quite useful if you plan on getting some huge spikes in traffic. I know that a few years ago one of my articles went viral and hit the front page of Digg. This resulted in around 20,000 visitors in the space of a few hours. It ending up being quite a bit of data transfer as you can imagine but because i was on an unlimited plan it didn’t matter! This is also true of creating new websites as you can just go into your main control panel and have a new site up and running in a few minutes.
One thing to be aware of though is the small print as there will always be some clause about “reasonable usage”. Now with most providers this isn’t really an issue as all they are doing is trying to protect themselves from people who may abuse the service. There are however reports of some service providers using it to kick off some medium use users, ie they are hoping most people use very little of their bandwidth. Still i think this accounts for a very small percentage of web hosts and shouldn’t be an issue for most.
So there you have it, my roundup of opinions on unlimited web hosting, more to come soon!
