(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In a somewhat brief announcement issued Wednesday, shared hosting giant 1&1 Internet (www.1and1.co.uk) announced that it had made several upgrades to its shared hosting plans.
Starting Wednesday, the company will remove traffic limits on each of its web hosting packages for page impressions, as well as downloads and uploads of files.
The company is also upgrading web storage space for its shared web hosting accounts by up to five times, taking the “Home” package from 1.5GB to 5GB, the “Business” package from 4GB to 20GB, the “Business Pro” from 8GB to 40GB and the “Professional” package from 20GB to 80GB.
To promote the new storage and bandwidth capacity, 1&1 says it is offering each of the Home, Business, Business Pro and Professional packages at half-price for six months. The discount, and the new specifications are described on the pricing page of the 1&1 UK website, although a fairly similar breakdown of packages is offered at the company’s US site, which uses slightly different names for similar packages (Home, Business and Developer).
According to the announcement, the half-price offering extends until the end of September, and includes not just shared hosting accounts, but dedicated and virtual servers, email solutions and eShops – including Exchange, SharePoint and MailXchange solutions. The promotional pricing is applied to deals with a minimum contract term of a year.
The new pricing and expanded services are notable not only for the probable impact of an increase of downward pressure on pricing in the already hyper-competitive shared hosting market, but for the interesting calculations of capacity that are no doubt required behind the scenes – offering an “unlimited” service to a customer base of millions of users could tax the company’s infrastructure.
Of course, in this case, the offer of unlimited bandwidth is reigned in somewhat by the hard cap on storage attached to each account. And I haven’t scrutinized the 1&1 terms of service contract, but there are presumably provisions in there for customers that overuse the resources allotted to them, as would be included by most reasonable shared hosting providers.
There has long been a debate about the practice of “overselling” in shared hosting, which some consider a dubious practice. Obviously, 1&1 can’t supply customers with “unlimited” bandwidth. But companies offering unlimited services don’t always publicize the size of their cushion of extra capacity.
Nevertheless, there was undoubtedly some large-scale recalculating of the potential for bandwidth consumption among 1&1 customers associated with this offering.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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