Ghost
Platinum Coder
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.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.
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.