In this article, we are going to understand what are the Unlimited Hosting Plans Limitations and restrictions from the top Web Hosting companies. In this article, we are primarily going to focus on three hosting companies given below:
Typically, when we talk about unlimited hosting, we think about unlimited resources. However, from the hosting companies perspective, they generally speak about unmetered disk space & data transfer (bandwidth).
It means that there are no hard limits on these parameters and you will not be billed on predefined threshold values. Does this say that you have unlimited resources? Well, no! Does this mean that the offer is not good? Absolutely not! The offer should suffice 99.95% of the customers who are merely looking for an online web presence.
Unlimited Hosting Plans Limitations
So let’s talk about the 0.5% of the workloads where customers intend to hit the limits of the shared host that these hosting companies offer.
For those of you who are not aware, the company hosts 2 million websites, most of which are using WordPress. They are also one of the few hosting companies officially recommended by WordPress.Org. Most of their support personnel are in-house and provide 24/7 online and phone assistance.
Now, let’s look at a snapshot of their unlimited plans below:
The Plus, Choice Plus, and Pro plans offer the following:
- Unlimited Websites
- Unlimited SSD Storage
- Unlimited (Unmetered) Bandwidth
- Unlimited Domains (Primary & Parked)
- Unlimited Sub-Domains
However, you will need to be careful with the terms and conditions that Bluehost offer. On a high-level, the company cites the following:
- Disk Space usage should be by a normal usage running a website. Any anomaly or deviations might impose restrictions on normal operations.
- Bandwidth usage should be consistent with the size of the Website.
- Storing large media files on your cPanel account is against the terms of usage.
However, based on our experience, we saw that you would run out of system resources and iNode usage much before you hit those upper limits.
2. Siteground
Siteground is a smaller company compared to Bluehost. However, they host a lot of WordPress sites and specializes in a highly optimized shared hosting for maximum performance. The company also provides an in-house caching and performance plugin called “SG Optimizer” which helps you minify JS, CSS and HTML files to reduce load times.
Now, with regards to unlimited hosting, the company only provides unlimited Website hosting and unmetered bandwidth for the GrowBig and GoGeek plans.
As you can see from the screenshot, you do not get unlimited storage or Inodes. So, you are constrained to system resources and would imply restrictions if you are over-utilizing the server resources.
There are also some hard limits on CPU usage and account executions, but this should not affect your regular website operations for small to medium-sized businesses.
Typically, these websites with the correct cache settings can service hundred and thousands of hits on a given day.
We always got better performance from a GoGeek account on Siteground hosting as compared with a Bluehost shared hosting. Overall, highly recommended for shared hosting places.
3. Hostgator:
Just like Bluehost, Hostgator is also owned by Endurance International Group and offer similar web hosting and with similar restrictions on their unlimited shared-hosting plans.
As you would expect, there are no hard limits on the storage, and the bandwidth is unmetered. You can also link unlimited domains (Baby & Business Plans) and are restricted to system resources such as iNode usage, account executions, CPU usage, etc.
Now, let’s identify the conditions and restrictions:
Unlimited Domains:
It means that customers are not charged for adding multiple domains to your Hostgator cPanel account. This, of course, means that you will have to own these domains before adding them to your account.
Since domain names are not free, there is a recurring charge associated with it.
Email Policy and Limits:
Each addon & subdomains get a separate 500 outgoing emails per hour with a hard limit.
There is a 30 times check limit on your POP Servers exceeding which will likely get a password error indicating that the login is incorrect. The login error will subside within an hour, and the email check will automatically unlock.
If you have more than 900 email addresses on your mailing lists, Hostgator only allows your emails to be sent during off-peak hours to prevent high server loads. For greater than 5000 email lists, you will require a VPS or a Dedicated Server.
Number of Visitors per Day
Your shared hosts support up to 7,000 – 8,000 users per day based on estimated average CPU usage over some time. In case if your traffic spikes are too high and for too long, you can exceed your resource limitations, and your account can be suspended.
So what’s unlimited about this plan? The Hostgator plan offers infinite disk space and bandwidth, and they are genuinely unmetered.
Conclusion
I hope this article helped you in understanding the Unlimited Hosting Plans Limitations in more details.
Questions or suggestions are welcome in the comment section below. Thanks for visiting!