"Unlimited" aka Unmetered Resources

[Ghost]

I've never read that before, at least in Germany, the providers have always indicated the size of the memory.
This is technically not possible because memory is always limited.
Most promises are unfounded, if not lies.

Years ago like 99% of shared hosting companies had "unlimited" plans. They then changed the language to "unmetered" plans because they won't fully track/cap your storage or bandwidth, they just track the CPU/RAM/etc. It might be different in the US/EU, but it's definitely something I see quite often, even if it was more common in the past.

Here's my thoughts on how they kind of get away with it ...

Yeah, unlimited is never technically possible. Even if a hosting provider added more RAM/CPU/Space & servers for a client every time they grew, it wouldn't be unlimited. The hosting company could spend $100 MILLION per second (and growing that $ amount exponentially every second) - keeping a client's website up for the world and the client might feel like they have unlimited resources because the hosting company just adds more servers whenever they need them... However, this is just a "contractual definition of unlimited". It means that the company is simply willing to spend ANY amount of money to keep their client's site online. It's not a "REAL definition of unlimited". The real unlimited can go from 0 to infinity in 0.00 seconds. That's the true definition of unlimited. To have unlimited anything, the resource must already exist in an unlimited amount, but because any resource has a finite amount of itself at any given time, there is no actual resource in the known universe that is "unlimited". Sure, things can expand / grow for an unlimited amount of time, but if we had a giant PAUSE button to stop the universe then everything could be counted. The point is that even with $100 Trillion to spend on something, you can only have as much as there is available & only at the rate at which it grows in number. An immortal baker could theoretically bake an unlimited number of pies for eternity, but only at the speed of their baking... So they never can offer "unlimited" pies without also saying "up to 1 per day". So a hosting company can say you have an unlimited amount of disk space / bandwidth, because they also say "you can only transfer data at X speed / use Y CPU, and use Z RAM"... If you limit the speed at which something is consumed, it becomes almost legal & acceptable to offer it in an unlimited amount. It's a fine print type of rip off, but technically it's not a lie.

It's like this...
An apple farm can have an "unlimited" number of apples if the trees keep growing healthily forever, and ever, and ever.
However, the apple farm might only ever have 1,000 apples at any given time. So even though the trees are dropping thousands of apples each season, for an unlimited amount of time (in theory), they never actually HAVE an unlimited amount of apples available. There are always a certain number of apples (or anything in the world), even if that number increases forever. So you can't go to the farm & buy unlimited apples, but you could buy thousands of apples per season, for an unlimited time. The rate at which you buy them means you are mathematically never able to achieve "unlimited apples", but it might feel like you are able to buy an unlimited number of apples.

 

[Tealk]

I see quite often, even if it was more common in the past.

Yes, with the bandwidth I know that but not with the storage.

 

[Ghost]

Yes, with the bandwidth I know that but not with the storage.

Here is one of HostGator's shared hosting plan descriptions of space/bandwidth. You can see how stingy they get in the fine print

Disk space and bandwidth is "Unmetered" which means you are not charged according to the amount of disk space or bandwidth you use.

However, that being said, we do require all customers to be fully compliant with our Terms of Service and to only utilize disk space and bandwidth in the normal operation of a personal or small business website.

For example, customers who are using 25% or more of system resources for longer than 90 seconds would be in violation of our Terms of Service. Please see our Terms of Service or contact us with any questions.

This is very similar to other disclaimers that hosts have had. As you can see, the disk space/bandwidth is "not tracked", but the 25% or more of system resources locks down the CPU/RAM abilities per user, the ToS has more restrictions, and you can only utilize space/bw for personal or small business site... So you can't offer big downloads or do anything weird. A couple years ago we got kicked off of a host because we were using our dedicated server to crawl the internet & store business data... They were like "nope, no thanks" and kicked us off after just 1 day of running our scripts, and that was a fully dedicated server for over $100/mo.

 

[Tealk]

For example, customers who are using 25% or more of system resources for longer than 90 seconds would be in violation of our Terms of Service.

What kind of crap is this? Who buys anything there?

So I do not know such cases in the German area at all.

 

[Ghost]

What kind of crap is this? Who buys anything there?

So I do not know such cases in the German area at all.

I don't use them, but they are a multi million dollar hosting company based in Texas. Shared hosting commonly has strange fine print like this.

Here is GoDaddy's fine print:

We don't limit the amount of storage and bandwidth your site can use as long as it complies with our Hosting Agreement. Should your website bandwidth or storage usage present a risk to the stability, performance or uptime of our servers, we will notify you via email and you may be required to upgrade, or we may restrict the resources your website is using. It’s very rare that a website violates our Hosting Agreement and is typically only seen in sites that use hosting for file sharing or storage.

 

[Tealk]

I have just reviewed the terms and conditions of netcup again and there is no such nonsense.

Even if I have a VPS there and no webspace

 

[Ghost]

I have just reviewed the terms and conditions of netcup again and there is no such nonsense.

Even if I have a VPS there and no webspace

Yeah, EU is better and any non-shared solution usually doesn't have this.

However Netcup does say they can cancel accounts for CPU/resource use too on regular hosting. They specifically say you are not allowed to use their hosting for:

• Running server services that cause a particularly high CPU load; this does not apply in the case of dedicated and root servers

If the customer breaches the code of conduct as set out above or if there is a well-founded suspicion of the same, netcup is entitled to temporarily block the provision of services normally provided to the customer.

Most hosts, including Netcup, have rules about how you use their servers. Too much CPU = ban.

 

[Tealk]

Most hosts, including Netcup, have rules about how you use their servers. Too much CPU = ban.

Since you can only run webfiles there, you will never encounter the problem that the apache/nginx server reaches its limits before.

 

[Ghost]

Since you can only run webfiles there, you will never encounter the problem that the apache/nginx server reaches its limits before.

Well, I don't know a lot about the service, so I'll trust what you're saying... but you can definitely spike CPU with PHP files. PHP is an interpreted language, so you can use some fairly basic PHP and risk spiking the CPU if you code it improperly. There are several core PHP functions that are known to use more CPU than people might realize, and there's plenty of web applications out there that require a lot more resources than one would think.

I'm not disagreeing with you that Netcup is a good solution for you, but poorly written code OR well written code (that is doing certain things) can most certainly spike CPU on the web hosting and get you banned. If you run a web crawler for example, I'm fairly confident that they would flag you for high CPU usage.