Following the competitors, DreamHost launched this month a promotional hosting package with unlimited disk space and transfer for the first 1,111 customers. At first sight, the mindless may think: “it’s the end of my hosting problems”. But how is it possible to offer a service with those resources without changing the price?

I have been observing since 2006 an accelerated growth on hosting plan resources that would make Moore speechless. Observe the old DreamHost’s “Stricty Business” across the years:

I toke DreamHost plan as example, but this is a pattern in shared hosting market. The growth of disk and transfer limits is absurd. Even considering the reduction of costs by scale, acquisition of new equipments and the fall of bandwidth prices, it’s clear that is a marketing move.

Previously, to obtain a service with better quality, we chose a hosting company that didn’t oversell. It was a way to limit the number of users the provider put on each server. But today, the way it is sold, looks like it’s a good deal to host websites with a company who sells more then have to offer.

The truth is: with the promise of unlimited resources, the hosts have total freedom do define how many clients they will put on each server. The consequence is crowded servers that are slow and unstable. Beyond that, the users support is not good because of the lack of staff and hire of professionals without the required qualification.

But then, what is the purpose of a plan without limits if the websites stay hours offline, with moments of slowness and without a good support?  Instead of offering this kind of service, it will be much more coherent if the hosting companies inform clearly what is the relation “resources/sites” they work with, what are memory and process limits (usualy hidden on TOS) and what are the uptime and workload of all servers.

Unfortunately Neverland does not exist. The resources are limited, cost money and there are just a few shared hosting providers who offer quality and transparency. The better choice for who needs service guarantee is to migrate to a VPS account or go directly to a Cloud. The extra money spent is irrelevant, if you compare it to the stress and the losses caused by a Nighmarehost.