small reseller hosting How can they survive?

[cookie]

The virus started from hostx with unlimited disk space and bandwidth
Now host1,host2 and many other big companies are giving away
unlimited (unmetered) disk space and bandwidth.
This is impossible but is attracting a lot of people.
How are those small companies or resellers going to survive?

 

[Jeren]

I see it as nothing more than a gimmick. Do tell me what kind of hardware has an infinite amount of disk space.

Obviously, as we know there are physical limits on disk space, and only so much traffic can go over any given cable/wire/connection at a time, there are limits there. But people would rather go with an 'unlimited' account as they feel they have more room to experiment.

For them to offer such to people, they obviously are counting on many users to NOT use their resources. Thus, I'm pretty confident, that any host offering unlimited resources does some overselling of some kind. Some of the smaller hosts may oversell to the max to try and cram everyone's 'unlimited' accounts on as few servers as possible.

Really, I can't see how any of that makes for a good hosting company. I'd rather have my sites hosted by a company that tells me what I'm getting for my money than with a company that lets everyone have a 'free-for-all' on their system.

That, of course, is just my opinion.

 

[Dan]

Jeren is absolutely right, these 'all-you-can-eat' types of hosts do oversell and they oversell a LOT. They also do not sell you unlimited anything if you reach their internal cap (either disk space or bandwidth) they will shut down your account and most times not even give you a reason as to why or even communicate with you at all. I have even seen hosts do this when it wasn't an unlimited account, they'll sell you 5gb of disk space but if you try to actually USE that 5gb they shut you down.

This is not even taking into account the lack of performance that you will see on such a server: huge page load times, service unavailable, random server disconnects. All because the server is so overcrowded/overloaded.