People have always been suckers for “big” marketing words. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, if you include such words as “free”, “bonus”, “gift”, “unlimited”, “special” and “one time deal” to your offer, you’re significantly increasing your chances on making a sale.
Why? – Because people just love to feel like they got the better of you in a single deal.
They just love feeling like they got a little bit extra for their money’s worth.
It doesn’t really matter what you’re selling, or if your deal is actually a good deal, if you know how to communicate your offer in a such way that your potential clients feel like they’re one step in front of you, you’re gonna make some big bucks.
Jeffrey Gitomer, a very famous American professional speaker and business trainer, once said: “In sales, it’s not what you say; it’s how they perceive what you say.”
To be a good salesman, you don’t need to be super intelligent. All you need to know is how to feed your audiences’ greed and convince them that you’re giving them something that no one else in their right mind will.
In the web hosting industry, people use a lot of dirty tricks in order to stay competitive and get more and more people to host their businesses on their servers. To me, personally, there isn’t a single trick that I find more horrid than a “Unlimited Web Hosting” deal.
When I see offers like these around the web, I really feel bummed out. I know we are all looking for a way to make extra money, and that’s ok, but I strongly feel that we don’t need to scam people in order to reach our goals.
Reality Check
To clarify things, there’s no such things as “unlimited storage” and “unlimited bandwidth”.
There’s no such thing as a disk with unlimited space. It doesn’t exist. It hasn’t been made yet.
Unlimited is a great marketing term.
Just like “free”, unlimited gets people’s attention and gives the impression of, well, “unlimited” service.
We all jump out of our seats when we see similar words attached to some sort of product or service.
Who can blame us? Who doesn’t want to buy something that is everlasting or endless?
Unlimited storage generally means that your hosting company won’t measure your storage usage, or place a quota on it. Most of our competitors get away with this because with a couple of 2TB drives in the server, most people will never upload “unlimited” gigabytes of data.
In most cases, 99 out of the 100 users will consume a small fraction of the traffic and space, and this allows the host to oversell servers, while claiming that their hosting is unlimited.
We at AltusHost get asked about this all the time, and we feel that it’s of great importance that we take action and educate our public about this sort of deal.
Let’s Break it Down
When running a web server, you have (contextually) three costs – drive space (cheapest), processor cycles/memory, and bandwidth (most expensive).
Now, if you, for the sake of the story, give John unlimited space, and he somehow manages to exhausts more space than you planned he will, then all other businesses who share the same disk with him will experience difficulties.
The closer you get to being unlimited, the slower your site will become, the longer updates will take, and the more their support will contact you about the small print.
To eliminate this possibility of you calling them out for their unlimited hosting being limited, almost all web hosts companies that offer this sort of deal have set some restrictions about the maximum usage.
They all have a usage policy at Terms of Services, carefully placed in fine print, that is ignored by the majority of webmasters.
The main purpose of this policy is to tell webmasters that they can utilize as many server resources as they want to run their websites, but the prerequisite is that they can never overuse this benefit and excess the allocation entitled to them. Otherwise, the hosting companies may implement some penalties like suspending the website without notification.
In layman’s terms, they’re playing you for a fool, and you can’t do anything about it.
So, when you’re looking at anything that says “unlimited”, the limits are usually spelled out in the fine print or in the Terms and Conditions. Most of the time, “unlimited” won’t affect you, as most websites don’t actually hit the hidden limits, but it’s still not nice to know that you’re actually paying for something that doesn’t really exist.
Like Henry Ford once said: “The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.”
So, before go like a hungry fish for a shiny bait, remember to always first read the fine print, because, like you can take away from everything written above, you don’t want to find yourself in a situation where a single, carefully placed paragraph, ends up tricking you to pay for something that doesn’t really exist.
Thank you for sparing a couple of minutes from your busy day to read my article.
Remember to share this post with your friends and colleagues. As I can probably imagine, you don’t want to see them suckered into making a rubbish deal.
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
