Yahoo! announced last week that they are releasing the blocks on hosting, offering "Unlimited" bandwidth and storage for Small Business owners. While on the first glance the cost of $12 a month for "Unlimited" space and bandwidth seems like a steal of a bargain, is the offer all it is cracked up to be?
Yahoo! announced last week that they are releasing the blocks on hosting, offering "Unlimited" bandwidth and storage for Small Business owners. While on the first glance the cost of $12 a month for "Unlimited" space and bandwidth seems like a steal of a bargain, is the offer all it is cracked up to be? (Photo J. Anderson \ Yahoo!)
From an insiders look at hosting, the offer seems fishy. The price of $12 for "Unlimited" options seems too low for the resource usage. Alright, the offer is not fishy; it is comical and borders on scary. The "Unlimited Space" offering is something fly-by-night Web Hosting services have often used as a marketing gimmick. To those who are familiar with the hosting world, this is called overselling. Yahoo! knows that almost no one, arguably ninety-eight percent of the clients, would ever come close to using a fraction of the space available on one shared hosting server. Those who do will be flagged.
Here is how Yahoo! explains it, "Yahoo! Web Hosting is also a shared web hosting service, which means a number of customers' web sites are hosted from the same server. To ensure that Yahoo! Web Hosting is reliable and available for the greatest number of users, a customer's web site usage cannot adversely affect the performance of other customers' sites. Additionally, the purpose of Yahoo! Web Hosting is to host web sites, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space for archiving electronic files is prohibited."
In English, this means if you plan to store media, forget it. Have some applications developed by your firm archived for download? Video? Audio? To quote their FAQ, "You can now create as large a site as you like (you won't face an upper limit, or "ceiling"), but we will place some constraints on how fast you can grow. In other words, you can add as much content as you want, but maybe not all at once.”
Read that as they tell you, you have all the space you want to grow with, but grow too fast and you are at risk of losing the account. They do explain that, “The vast majority of our customers' sites grow at rates well within our rules, however, and will not be impacted by this constraint.”
Yahoo! used to charge companies $12 a month for 5GB of space and 200GB of transfer. They charged $20 a month for 10GB of space and 400GB of transfer. Larger sites paid $40 for 20GB of space and 500GB transfer. That is a lot of stuff to offer, and the same restrictions applied then as they do now. However, the word "Unlimited" will appeal to those business owners who want to save on overhead. In Web Hosting, there is no such thing as "Unlimited" anything. Even Internet giants like Yahoo! have to pay for the bandwidth and space they offer to clients and use themselves. While they do not pay what a regular hosting company would, the cost is still there, and it is likely fixed.
Next is the "Unlimited Data Transfer" Yahoo! offers. Web hosts talk about Bandwidth and Data Transfer in the same breath, but the truth is while different they are closely related. Bandwidth is how much data can be transferred at a time and Data Transfer is how much data is being transferred. "Think of it this way. If Bandwidth were a bridge, then the bigger the bridge is, the more vehicles can pass through it. While data transfer is the number of vehicles allowed on the bridge in, say a month. In essence, Data Transfer is the consumption of Bandwidth," to quote an older marketing text used by several hosting companies.
"The less bandwidth you have, the slower your site is to load, regardless of your visitor’s connection type. If you have more visitors, some of them will have to wait their turn. The least data transfer you have, the more often you’ll find your site unavailable because you’re reached the maximum allowed until a new month rolls by or you upgrade your account...Thinking back to the bridge. What happens is each visitor to your site will be given a smaller lane to transfer the data, creating many tiny lanes therefore “Unlimited”. The more visitors you have the smaller each lane will be, which makes each visitor wait for the page to load. More often than not there is little choice over your Bandwidth as your host controls this. Some hosts may limit the number of simultaneous connections so in affect slowing down your site and refusing some visitors. This is called throttling. If you’re concerned about this, you should ask the host how they control bandwidth usage or purchase a package with more data transfer," the marketing material adds.
Yahoo! explains their Data Transfer usage rules as such, "In most cases, if you use our service appropriately, visitors to your web site will be able to download and view as much content from your site as they like. However, in certain circumstances, our server processing power, server memory, or anti-abuse controls could limit downloads from your site. You can also upload as much as content as you like each month, subject only to the rules that control how fast your site can grow (see data storage)."
So again, the service is in their own words "Unlimited" as long as you follow their restrictions and limits.
It is interesting to note that in the TOS (Terms of Service) for the Small Business hosting on Yahoo!, restrictions and exact limits are not disclosed.
How is it Yahoo! can claim “Unlimited” anything, and then impose limits? You have seen this in the past, with Verizon's unlimited plan on their laptop cards and Comcast's Unlimited Internet service. Each faced lots of negative PR and complaints prompting both companies to disclose restrictions and even alter the service to an extent.
There you have it. To quote one reader on a story posted about this "news" over at The Register, "I have come to realize that the word 'unlimited' now actually means 'less than you'd expect'..."
Nothing is "Unlimited," especially in the realm of online business. It is as simple as that.
Paul GJul 30th, 2008 - 02:09:59
These Yahoo\'s \'unlimited\' service conditions are a real JOKE, now YAHOO have the power to change the \'meaning\' of terms in the dictionary, so there is a new meaning for \'UNLIMITED\' by Yahoo.
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