FAQ
Why do you only offer one plan?
Is your UNLIMITED plan really unlimited?
Do you oversell?
Do you host adult sites?
Do you have an affiliate program?
How long have you been in business?
Why do you only offer one plan?
We only offer one plan because we don't believe in nickeling and diming our customers for things like extra MySQL databases, extra email accounts, or extra domains and subdomains.
If you look at what other companies offer, even their smallest plans provide more than enough disk space and data transfer for the vast majority of hosting customers. The most meaningful difference between most plans is the number of "extras" that are included because you're far more likely to need multiple email accounts than you are to need multiple GB of disk space.
If you want more than one POP3 account or MySQL database, then you have to go with a plan that also provides more disk space and data transfer, even though you probably don't need more. The fact is that there is absolutely no difference in cost between providing one POP3 account or 1,000 POP3 accounts. The difference in cost between providing 1GB of disk space and 100GB is negligible... just look at how little a hard drive costs these days. Besides, most customers won't ever exceed a few MB.
Offering multiple plans is simply a way of creating a "perception" of value to justify a higher price, without offering any "actual" value in return for the price.
Is your UNLIMITED plan really unlimited?
As soon as a hard drive with infinite capacity, and a broadband connection with infinite capacity, and a processor capable of running at infinite GHz are invented then our UNLIMITED plan will be truly unlimited.
What we mean by "unlimited" is that there are no quotas. We don't impose any restrictions other than a policy of fair use for legitimate purposes as defined in our terms of service. You may use as much in the way of system resources as you need to the extent that is appropriate in a shared hosting environment (full details are disclosed in our terms of service).
Even if it was possible to provide infinite capacity and bandwidth, you would still be limited in terms of how much you could actually make use of. Can you create infinite content, and generate infinite traffic to your site? If so, please let us know. We're pretty good at generating traffic, but we'd love to have an infinite number of visitors and an infinite number of paying customers.
The plan is unlimited but not infinite, however we do actively monitor system resources, and we add capacity whenever total sustained usage exceeds a certain threshhold, and that threshhold is nowhere near 100%. As a result, our customers won't be seeing any "disk full" errors or server timeouts when trying to connect.
Do you oversell?
Of course we do. Every company, in every industry that provides intangible products or services... oversells. It's good for the company because it is only necessary to bear the cost of obtaining what customers will actually use rather than what the company is obliged to make available to customers. It's also good for the customers because they may obtain what they actually use at a lower price than they would otherwise be forced to pay. Overselling is a good thing when done properly.
Your phone company offers you unlimited local phone calls, but has insufficient capacity for every single customer to be on the phone at the same time. But when was the last time you weren't able to put a call through?
Your insurance company offers you fire insurance at rates far below what it would cost to repair or replace your home. They're obligated to repair or replace all their customer's homes in the event of fire. If your home burns down, the insurance company can afford to pay your claim because their other customer's homes didn't burn down.
Airlines sell more tickets than they have seats available. They know exactly what percentage of passengers will show up late, and miss their flights. On the rare occassion when a flight is actually full, that additional revenue covers the cost of "bumping" the extra passengers onto another flight and upgrading their seats for the inconvenience. When is the last time you were on a plane with no empty seats?
In the hosting industry, we know that even when there are no limits imposed on customers, the average website is only a few MB in size, leaving plenty of disk space for the relatively few customers who will have sites that are several GB in size. With respect to data transfer, we hope you'll be successful and have enough traffic to use a lot of it, but most websites get relatively little traffic... leaving you with plenty of bandwidth available when your site makes it to the top spot on page 1 of Google's search results.
Statistically, most hosting customers will only use a few MB, some will use a few hundred MB, and relatively few will use more than 1GB. But, still... it is a legitimate question to ask. What if someone were to sign up for an account and use 1000 GB?
First, anyone who would legitimately require such a large amount of disk space would not even consider a shared hosting account. It simply isn't appropriate for their needs. Imagine a site like YouTube, or Google on anything other than a cluster of dedicated and load-balanced servers. A shared hosting account is simply not going to cut it, and such sites will be more concerned with an appropriate solution than a rock-bottom price. Nobody is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a large-scale site, and then not want to have total control over the server that hosts the site.
Where we might have an issue is with uses that are not legitimate and/or not permitted by our terms of service, for example adult sites, warez sites (offering downloads of pirated software, music, video, etc.), use of the provided disk space for purposes other than hosting a website such as backing up one's hard drive, or reselling the space provided. Anyone doing anything that breaches our terms of service will be promptly invited to leave so that other customers may continue to enjoy legitimate use of the service.
Do you host adult sites?
Absolutely NOT!!! Any websites displaying any type of adult content will immediately be deleted upon discovery. The offending account will be terminated without notice, and no refunds will be issued. Any and all fees paid will be held as liquidated damages.
Do you have an affiliate program?
We prefer to develop joint venture partnerships. If you have a creative proposal that may be mutually beneficial, then we'd love to hear from you.
How long have you been in business?
Long enough to know what we're doing. In fact, we have been around long enough to get a .com domain name that has relevant English language words in it, with no numbers or hyphens in it either.
thewebhostcompany.com has been in operation since 2004, and the owner has been involved in the hosting industry since way back in the 20th century... beginning in 1996.
