It’s been a growing trend for web hosting services to offer unlimited space, bandwidth, and domains. Of course, this looks like a great deal, that is until you look a little closer. The reality is, these free-for-all services have many downfalls and offer much less than what they say. We investigated some of the top five unlimited-offer web hosting services (we are not going to mention names because we do not want to have any personal issues with them). We can say all five are spending tens of thousands a month or more to get new customers.
Our policy now and is always to not have any hidden fees, tricks, or inflated offers. This way you know exactly what you are getting and paying at all times.
One of the top hosts we checked into that offers unlimited space, bandwidth, and domains had exactly what we suspected. In their terms of conditions, we found this interesting snippet.
What happens if I exceed “normal” usage?
What happens if I exceed “normal” usage? If we have concerns about your account’s bandwidth or storage space utilization, you will receive an email asking you to reduce usage. Generally, we provide customers with a minimum of 48 hours to make adjustments before taking the account offline.
As you can imagine, if you’re not monitoring your site each day and something goes viral or your site simply grows fast, this service will give you 48 hours to change your site or be shut down. This made me wonder how many people and businesses have had their sites shut down. With a quick investigation, we found hundreds of people who have had their sites shut down and with almost no notice. The reality is… these services will take in as many sites as possible, offering them everything and the kitchen sink. Then, as soon as you become a high-use website or just have a burst, they will find reasons to have you leave.
The goal of these services is to keep the low-use customers and force the above-normal-use customers to leave.
This is the opposite of everything we stand for. Web Host Pro was founded by webmasters in the early nineties who had to deal with these situations and lost money and time from it. Not only do we not favor low-use sites, we also have a system that allows you to get the resources you need with no risk of your site going down. Going above normal is part of any active website. Especially if you are marketing and creating a popular web presence. The piece of mind with using a web hosting service that you can trust and know your website is safe is why we have hundreds of thousands of customers with almost no marketing. Our profits go into new technology to make our servers and networks run the fastest possible.
The day I am writing this 6/28/2016 I did a speed test for Web Host Pro vs the top five unlimited web hosts and the closest one was still 30% slower than us and the slowest was 60% slower. That’s also the service main page network, many times these budget web hosts put customers on another network that is not as fast as what their main site uses.
All of these tricks might get customers to sign up, but we know if you want to survive long term, you are going to need to build trust. We believe being honest and guaranteeing your site will be consistently fast will build a lasting relationship with our customers. We like to think this is why we get new customers every day from our customers spreading the word of what we offer. Word of mouth has always been our main method for new customers to find us.
Some of the other tricks we see are prices set low and then in the final stage of your check they make you choose multiple years to get that price. We provide exactly what prices we have and the discounts for bulk payments right on our web hosting page. When you go into your checkout for your new web hosting account, you get the same price you see when you signed up.
We also found two of the top five unlimited hosting services had extra charges for their website builder. I was really shocked to see that. Here, we always give you 100% access to the best web hosting tools for all plans with no extra fees. We also constantly make sure we have the best technology available to build and manage your website.
I can’t say we are the best web hosting service, but I can say we are one of the most honest, reasonably priced, and reliable.
Thanks for reading and best of luck with your website!