It's become increasingly popular for companies to offer "unlimited" hosting plans, ostensibly giving you an infinite amount of storage space for your website, and an infinite amount of available monthly bandwidth to transfer data.

Obviously, this is impossible. All computers have a storage limit.

So what do they mean? Unfortunately, it's a bit of a marketing gimmick. And in the cutthroat world of hosting companies, each scrambling over themselves to get your dollar, if one starts doing it, the rest essentially have to as well to compete.

Generally, when you see "Unlimited hosting!" it means that the hosting provider knows 99% of the people who sign up for this plan are not going to come CLOSE to being a resource hog. And hence, they'll never know that they really don't have unlimited space or bandwidth.

The truth is you'll need to carefully read the terms of service of your hosting provider; most will mention that you cannot upload all of your content "at once."

Now, does this mean that offering unlimited hosting means the host is scamming you? Not really; as long as you are aware that you may need to upgrade to a virtual private server at some point if you get too big.

For your small to average sized website that doesn't offer large downloads of audio or video or images, unlimited hosting will be just fine. The price is certainly right.

Just realize it's a marketing term that has unfortunately become entrenched.

Check out the list of unlimited hosting providers.