Is everything unlimited in shared hosting?
Overselling has been the name of the game for shared hosting since day one. Though many have frowned upon the practice, it made sense. The most obvious case for overselling was for disk space. A majority of hosting customers couldn’t use 20% of their disk quota – so as long as there was available space left on the hard drive – why not oversell? The customer still received everything it needed and was promised; and the hosting business made money that could be used to continue to grow and optimize the business.
The same was true for bandwidth. It didn't matter that the server was connected by a 10Mpbs Ethernet connection; theoretically, that still provided 3285 GB/month. So, why not sell 30GB/month plans? It is true you could reach a point that the number of accounts on the server could consume double the available bandwidth. And loading the server like this did not leave room for peak hours and traffic spikes. But in reality, most sites would never use more than 1GB of traffic per month so it did not matter; there was usually enough bandwidth.
Of course there are always exceptions. Popular sites as well as websites with a lot of pictures could get a lot of traffic and sometimes use a lot of disk space – and those would cost a lot of money.
At least they used to.
In 2000, a 10GB hard drive cost about $175.
In 2004, a 160GB hard drive cost about $170.
Today, a 2TB hard drive costs about $100!
Hard drive prices have fallen dramatically. With the one time cost of $0.06/GB, it does not matter how much disk space a website uses if they are paying you $8/month. Disk space can run out, but as NAS & SAN are used more and more, it becomes less of an issue. The price of bandwidth is also dropping fast which is a very small portion of the overall cost of hosting an account.
The amount of traffic any site can produce can be limited by CPU & IO usage. Most terms of service (ToS) agreements prevent sites from using too much CPU and IO. Over time websites have become more dynamic and the use of Ajax techniques have increased the demand on CPU and IO with more dynamic interfaces on web pages. While many websites use more disk space from 3-4 years ago, they often use much more CPU & IO.
So, why use unlimited? Most customers have no idea how much disk space or traffic they need. ‘Unlimited’ is a great marketing technique - it always wins against 10GB, 300GB or 3000GB plans against the competition.
Why not offer unlimited everything? Unlimited domains, unlimited emails, etc. It sounds like a joke but many hosting companies do in fact offer all of that. Today, it does not matter how many domains or mail boxes the hosting account has. The acquisition and support costs are two of the largest line items in running a hosting business - so it is worth it to attract new customers.
Shared hosting has become highly commoditized in that regard. The low price, all-you-can- eat offer is becoming the norm. It is easy to deliver and easy to sell.
What prevents a customer who would be best suited for a dedicated server from using shared hosting? Usually it is the terms of services that prevent this. Often they state that a user cannot use too much CPU, IO or any other system resources.
Why not charge for these resources instead? Or at the very least why not limit them? The answer is simple – there has never been a good way to limit or account for CPU and IO usage, nor there been a good way monitor it.
Until now.
The best solution for the “everything unlimited, all-you-can-eat” plan is .
CloudLinux is an operating system that is RPM-based and interchangeable with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Centos. What CloudLinux does that other OS cannot is give the hosting service provider the ability to control the CPU resources on the server by limiting the amount of resources (CPU, I/O, memory) available to a group of processes. This ensures that each account on a shared server is allocated enough CPU resources to run efficiently without jeopardizing the other tenants on that server. Check out more at .
"What prevents a customer who would be best suited for a dedicated server fr om using shared hosting?"
OK, if they are "best suited for a dedicated server" then why would you sell them shared hosting at all?
Very interesting article, but I am not quite understanding the conclusion. Are you saying hosters should now pitch “everything unlim ited, all-you-can-eat” plans because they can ensure that resources will not be overly consumed by any one user?
Or that they should now offer a suite of packages based on resource usage?
What we are suggesting is that with this new tool, CloudLinux, we believe there are better ways to serve your customers AND for hosters to market/manage their servers. With CloudLinux, you can not only manage resources on your server - you can also identify which users are better suited for dedicated -- this could not be done before. LVE technology lets the web host see who uses and therefore needs the additional resources -- and lets the web host act accordingly.
We are not advocating that "unlim ited" is the way to go -- this is really up to the hoster and what is better for them to sell/what their customer buys.
Selling based on consumption is a new model that is only now available with the server management capabilities - our question is how can web hosts best use them?