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The buzz right now in hosting is unlimited everything. Unlimited bandwidth, Unlimited web space, Unlimited email accounts and so on. How does this affect you as a web hosting consumer?

This Unlimited craze is another way corporate America has ruined another type of business. Large hosting companies have found out that not everyone is going to use all the space or bandwidth allotted to them, so that means they can over sell what their server can realistically handle. There may be 100 Gigs of drive space and they might have 150 Gigs worth of accounts sold on that one machine. This seems to be ok to them. The money made on that server sure outweighs the few people they may loose because their site might go down for a while.

A more real world example is one that involves a PHP/MySQL shopping cart, I created for a customer. They went with someone that we later found out was one of these Unlimited hosting companies. What we got was the site continually going down because they limit the number of database calls to the server in hopes of lowering the load on the server. After countless times of emailling tech support, and calling them, that was their answer. Not, "is there anything we can do to fix this for you." No they felt, well take it or leave it...we made our money off of you. Our client lost a few months of hosting they prepaid, and the site was obviously down while we moved it.

Ask a lot of questions, when you are considering a hosting company. Remember for some folks that is your landlord if you are an online business. Would you rent space from a landlord that did nothing to help their tenants?...I wouldn't.