All You Can Eat Hosting
Written by Brent Oxley on October 20, 2008 – 10:45 am -We have some very exciting, disturbing, shocking, and electrifying news for you!
HostGator Web Hosting is now offering UNLIMITED DISK SPACE, UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH, and UNLIMITED DOMAINS for less than ten bucks a month.
I should be telling you this is a limited time offer and to sign-up while supplies last, but I’m not going to. If you decide to wait a few months, the plan just might change to unlimited bazillion-trillion everything. If you happen to sign up before the unlimited bazillion-trillion plans are released, we’ll be happy to upgrade you free of charge. If you think this all sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is! The “new” unlimited plan is the same plan we were offering a year ago, but now we label it as unlimited.
I wanted to call the plans unlimited last time around. However, due to staffing constraints, we wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the expected growth. A year later, we are finally OVERSTAFFED and ready to change the plan. Up until now, I’ve been slowing sales down on purpose in order for our support to catch up. If history repeats itself, renaming the plan from essentially unlimited to actually “unlimited” will increase our sales by at least 30%.
It’s really that simple.
We change an unlimited plan to say “unlimited” and bam — sales increase 30%, if not more. Many people will argue that “overselling” is evil and that it’s the cause of poor hosting service. This is not the case when it’s managed correctly and the proper staffing is in place. When a hosting company hops on the overselling bandwagon, their sales usually increase exponentially. Since very few companies actually have the capacity to handle a major surge in growth, their quality of service is almost guaranteed to deteriorate.
The support problems HostGator has had in the past weren’t from “overselling.” The problems were actually a result of growing faster than we could hire and train employees.
In the last year, we have been spending more money on recruiting employees than we have on advertising! It has taken us years of hiring and training to get us to the point where we are now. We’ve gone from begging employees to work overtime to asking who wants to go home. HostGator will always have the occasional scheduling gap, but for now, we’re sending over a dozen employees home a day.
I’m very confident that we’ll be able to handle the surge in growth that we will see as a result of going “unlimited.” Greed is what kills most overselling hosting companies, not their plans.
In other news, we have changed the name of our Swamp Web Hosting Plan to the slightly more professional hosting plan called “Business Web Hosting Plan“. The Business plan now includes both a free dedicated IP address and a free Private SSL. We will be updating these plans very soon with some additional and very cool e-commerce features.
I’m not going to spill the beans just yet, but I will say it’s something I’ve never seen included on shared hosting before, and I believe it will redefine what a business hosting plan is.
Tags: overselling, updates
Posted in Brent Oxley, News Bites | 26 Comments »
By Gerald Weber on Oct 21, 2008 | Reply
Wow! these are some really impressive changes. I will stay posted for the new E-commerce release. The free SSL with business hosting sounds like a great idea! Keep up the great work Brent and staff.
By Ron on Oct 22, 2008 | Reply
It’s great to see you going unlimited. I’ve been hosting with Gator for over 3 years now and I love it. Your support has always been good.
Thanks!
By Daniel Gardner on Oct 22, 2008 | Reply
HostGator has a tradition of going above and beyond the call of duty. Great work Brent and staff!
By narayan thapa on Oct 22, 2008 | Reply
It’s great.
What about your plan for resellers.. ?
By Adam on Oct 23, 2008 | Reply
I was just gonna say. When you upping the stakes for the reseller accounts?
Good work guys, keep it up
By CJ John on Oct 23, 2008 | Reply
AWESOME! And this move by Hostgator does not surprise me one bit. I find that your attention to the details of your business is what has kept you going, so, many kudos for this new feature.
Please don’t forget your resellers! :-D
~CJ
By himagain on Oct 25, 2008 | Reply
ARRRGGHHH!
It’s no wonder the world is in financial meltdown. People have totally lost touch with reality!
Quoting Brent:
“It’s really that simple.
We change an unlimited plan to say “unlimited” and bam — sales increase 30%, if not more.”
This insanity wasn’t really caused by the suppliers – it is caused by the customers cupidity/stupidity.
By Douglas (HostGator.com) on Oct 25, 2008 | Reply
Unlimited reseller accounts aren’t feasible in the same way that they are feasible for shared hosting.
If there was a reliable unlimited reseller account available, we’d move all of our accounts over to it and our millions of dollars per year in server fees would go down to $25 per month.
Hopefully that gives some perspective.
By mike from luckys arcade and pizza on Oct 26, 2008 | Reply
what happen to the group of people from gator who pick luckys pizza one of the best in seaside heights this past summer????? they were to post the outcome.
mike from luckys
By Gator on Oct 28, 2008 | Reply
haha,this is really a swell cartoon,great Idea!
By dotnetfreak on Oct 30, 2008 | Reply
Hi Brent,
Im desperately waiting for windows shared hosting, are there already an estimate?
Thanks in advance
By Fabricio on Oct 30, 2008 | Reply
No big deal. I will be impressed when they upgrade these plans to unlimited inodes and unlimited cpu time. :)
By sky2k4 on Nov 1, 2008 | Reply
funny how unlimited is, yes its over selling, what would they do if we added 1000 websites with 4000 videos at abou 345 megs a piece?
I Think they will need to adjust thier Terms of service.lmao. Unlimited is never unlimited.
its a marketing scheme..
By bob on Nov 5, 2008 | Reply
Hi
I have just compared the 7.95 and 12.95 hosting plans and for me there is no need to pay $13 when I can get all I need now for $8
Can i downgrade my account to the 7.95 tier now and save almost 50% of my money for practically the same services?
By Brayden on Nov 26, 2008 | Reply
This kind of stuff is never good for a hosting company. People will abuse this and soon the servers will be very slow. Remember there is no such thing as unlimited. I don’t think your servers can handle this.
By Rodrigo on Dec 8, 2008 | Reply
It´s a very woderfull news, but dont forget the resellers!!
By Salwa on Dec 16, 2008 | Reply
Nice offer, but what about resellers? and hey awesome cartoon!
By Lucie at GetCommissions.ws on Dec 29, 2008 | Reply
I kind of agree that this “unlimited” thing could be abused if people start to upload videos and other large files; that could slow servers down for everyone. We will have to wait and see what happens in the future. It’s true that the word “unlimited” is very attractive! :-)
By Yunus Beg on Jan 3, 2009 | Reply
Dear,
I m intrest in Reseller Hosting (windows) can you tel me any idea becoz i m in truble due to bad server hosting at present time
By Trendy Jewelry on Jan 9, 2009 | Reply
Of course, there is always the good old terms of service to take that “unlimited” and put it into perspective. People that think they can get unlimited space for 10 dollars are out of their minds…. Seriously
By Wildex999 on Jan 13, 2009 | Reply
I like the word “Unmetered” better than “Unlimited”, as that’s what it really is.
Well, looks good, I hope to go with one of your “Unlimited” plans by the end of the next month or so ;)
By Casey on Jan 21, 2009 | Reply
Definitely a marketing thing as others have mentioned but not necessarily overselling. I just came from GoDaddy (which imo has very high quality service) but were cramming offers and tacky commercials down my throat. We get it already Danica is very pretty, what the hell has it to do with 99.9% uptime or speed? You guys have a very clean site and if anything I would say undersell a lot of your services.
By Hannes on Jan 22, 2009 | Reply
This is just too good. I have many web sites and I found Hostgator just recently. Now I am transferring these sites to Hostgator from old provider, even while I have been there more than 4 years. They never had any problems, but all the megabyte limitations are just too much.
Hope to see that Hostgator continue to offer these really good terms in future also!
Thank you!
By Sourabh on Sep 28, 2009 | Reply
Do you have Planed unlimited space reseller hosting package in future.
By brent oxley on Sep 29, 2009 | Reply
Hi Sourabh,
I’m sorry we do not have any plans for unlimited reseller plans. It would be impossible to do unless we had a second model that allowed unlimited and instead put a limit on the amount of sites that could be hosted.
There’s some companies out there that do it but I guarantee they will not be in business for the long term.
By Sourabh on Oct 21, 2009 | Reply
Ya brent you are right, if you have some unlimited space plan with limit of account in future please let me know.