In the world of physical servers, “unlimited” is just a marketing word for “we haven’t throttled you yet.”
If you have ever shopped for budget web hosting, you have seen the pitch: For $3.99 a month, you get “Unlimited Storage,” “Unlimited Bandwidth,” and “Unlimited Websites.”
It sounds like an incredible deal. Why would you ever pay for a specific amount of storage when you can have infinite storage for the price of a coffee?
As engineers, we have a simple answer to that: Because physics exists.
There is no such thing as an infinite hard drive. There is no such thing as an infinite network pipe. When a hosting company sells you an “unlimited” plan, they aren’t selling you infinite resources. They are selling you a statistical gamble buried in legal fine print.
Here is the engineering reality behind the biggest lie in the hosting industry.
The "Buffet" Business Model
Budget hosting providers operate on a model called Overselling.
Think of it like an all-you-can-eat buffet. The restaurant knows that for every college football player who eats five plates of food, there are ten people who will only eat a salad. The averages work out in their favor.
In hosting, they cram thousands of customers onto a single server, banking on the fact that 95% of them will only run a tiny, low-traffic WordPress blog.
But what happens when your business grows and you become the football player at the buffet? The restaurant manager comes over and asks you to leave.
The "Fair Use" Trap
If you read the Terms of Service of any “unlimited” host, you will find a section usually called the Fair Use Policy. This is where the “unlimited” myth dies.
They don’t limit your disk space (GB); they hide the limits elsewhere.
1. The Inode Limit (The Hidden Killer)
An “inode” is a data structure on a Linux filesystem that stores information about a file. Every image, every email, and every cache file uses one inode.
Your host might give you “unlimited GB” of space, but limit you to 250,000 inodes. If you run a busy e-commerce site or have an email account with years of archives, you will hit that 250,000 limit fast. Even if you are only using 10GB of your “unlimited” space, your site will crash because the server cannot create a new file.
2. CPU and RAM Throttling
If your website gets a sudden spike in traffic (a good thing!), you start using more of that shared server’s CPU. The host’s automated systems will see you as a “noisy neighbor” hogging resources from the other 999 people on that server.
They won’t bill you for the extra usage. They will simply throttle your site’s performance until it crawls, or suspend your account entirely for “abuse.”
The Carl’s Consulting Agency Difference: Honest Engineering
We don’t sell “unlimited” because we don’t believe in lying to our clients about how computers work.
At Carl’s Consulting Agency, we operate entirely on private infrastructure. We don’t resell crowded shared hosting plans.
When you host with us, you pay for dedicated, defined resources. You know exactly how much space, RAM, and CPU power is allocated to your business. If you need more, we scale you up.
It costs more than $3.99 a month. But unlike the “unlimited” plans, our infrastructure is built to support your business when you succeed, not punish you for growing.
Your business deserves infrastructure that is honest, reliable, and private. Move your hosting to Carl’s Consulting Agency and get the performance you pay for.
