The price is right
Generally you get what you pay for, wouldn't you agree? If you buy a cheap car, you don't expect it to last very long. The same can be said for hosting. If you pay $1/month for hosting you shouldn't expect very much at all.
We would absolutely love to be able to offer you $1/month hosting whilst maintaining our hosting code of ethics, but it's a financial impossibility. To provide true quality hosting, it (regrettably) costs money. How do other hosts offer it? Quite simply because they oversell their services in such a fashion that they sacrifice performance and reliability in favour of getting more clients on their servers. This statistically increases downtime and can cause serious problems for other users of that server - particularly if the host are offering the fabled "unlimited" packages. It's not uncommon for some large hosts to have several thousand people sharing any single server. Ouch!
There is no such thing as UNLIMITED.
That's right, it's true. There is no such thing as unlimited. Anyone who is offering you unlimited of anything is lying. What they are really offering you is nothing more than what they consider "reasonable" usage of resources without any immediate restrictions. Who defines reasonable? Just what is reasonable? Surely if you pay for unlimited then you should be able to get just that, right? If only that were the case.
Most web hosts oversell their service. They offer "unlimited diskspace" and "unlimited bandwidth" because they realise that most accounts stay well within what they classify as "acceptable" limits, and rarely cause any problems. The problems only appear when you attempt to use more disk space or bandwidth than they deem acceptable. As soon as this happens, most hosts will tell you that you have "outgrown" your shared hosting and need to move to dedicated. Some will even terminate or suspend your websites - bringing them offline completely. Nice, huh?
The fact is that diskspace is a limited commodity. It doesn't matter if you have billions of dollars of funding behind you - disks still have a limited capacity, and there are only so many disks you can house in a server. As you might know from personal use - there's only so much data you can store/download to your PC or device before it runs out. This is almost no different from the hundreds of thousands of servers connected to the Internet. The only difference being that when a server runs out of space, it can either cause every site hosted on that server to die, or merely prevent anyone else from uploading new files. That would be bad, wouldn't it? What if you urgently needed to make a change to your site and couldn't?
Without any hard limits in place, there is effectively no control, and there is always a danger that a single rogue user could destroy the service for others. We know this, and that's why we don't offer you fraudulent dreams of unlimited services. Our packages are calculated to a particular "contention" on disk space, and we intend to keep it that way.
"But what about unlimited bandwidth?" I hear you ask. Well, this again is a completely imaginary marketing claim, simply because of the physical limitations of networking.
Firstly, bandwidth costs money. Every megabyte or gigabyte of data transferred through a network port by a web host has to be paid for. This can effectively be handled in 2 ways. Either you can purchase a set 'block' of bandwidth (ie 2000GB) or you can purchase what is referred to an "unmetered connection" at varying speeds.
What's the difference? Well, if you purchase a block of bandwidth (say 2000GB for example), you can usually transfer this 2000GB at a speed of up to 100Mbit. If you purchase an "unmetered connection" then you can transfer as much data as you like, however you are limited as to what speed you may do so. Can you see the limitation already?
By limiting the connection speed, and assuming that the connection was fully used 24/7, only a certain amount of data could possibly be transferred through the connection in a monthly period anyway. All you are effectively doing is removing the need to have to check how much data is transferred by slowing down the entire connection. It's pretty much like your ISP saying "You can download as much as you like, but you can only do it at 56k." Sure, it's unlimited.... but it's slow. Which would you rather, slow unlimited connection or super fast limit that you're unlikely to reach but can always increase later anyway?
We don't agree with making your website slower so that we can provide false claims of unlimited bandwidth. We sell bandwidth in blocks, per site, and we hard limit that. If you approach your limit, you need to upgrade your package or speak to our sales team to arrange a bandwidth topup.
What really goes on under the hood
Very few people understand how web hosting really works. They may have images of thousands of servers sitting somewhere and teams of people going back and forth doing constant monitoring of them. Lots of web hosts abuse this knowledge and will do amusing things like putting up pictures of "their" data center on their site. They'll then go on to throw around terms like "multiple redundant gigabit connections" in an attempt to dazzle the ignorant and win their custom with technical expressions.
In 99.5% of these cases, the web host in question does not have their own data center. In fact, they've probably never even seen a data center let alone their own server(s). Some of them won't even have servers that you can physically see. What are they talking about then?
Most "web hosts" rent a server or service from another host, and then pass it off as their own. There's nothing illegal or particularly wrong with this - it's their service to use after all. These hosts are effectively known as "resellers". They have no control over the network, and they have no access to the server if there are any physical problems with it, such as a disk dying. They are completely reliant upon the company whose product they are reselling.
All that "data center" and "multiple redundant connections" they babble on about on their website? That's right - it's all marketing stuff taken from the very people whose service they are reselling.
So what about this*? Are you resellers?
At this* we actually own our servers and co-locate with various co-location providers, such as LiquidWeb. We don't own or claim to own our own data center. Co-location effectively means that we give our server to a co-location provider, who then connect it to their network. We are then 100% responsible for it and its usage - the provider are never involved except when the network it is connected to is experiencing issues. It's very rare for this to happen.
Why is this better? Well, it means that we are effectively 100% in control of our business. Those who obtain standard dedicated servers from other providers are then reliant upon that providers support team to resolve any physical issues it may experience. This can be, and often is, a very slow and tedious process. You may have to wait 12 hours or so for a member of their support team to be able to replace a dead disk - and that's 12 hours of downtime for you and your customers. With us, we can replace the disk ourselves almost immediately.