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Comment by bmelton | Hacker News Reader

I hope that's the case, honestly, and I hope that it does go to court. I'm frankly sick and tired of the 'unlimited' advertising model, wherein unlimited really means limited to some arbitrary amount that is not disclosed.

As a customer who has been kicked off of a number of unlimited hosting services for a site that only does ~30Gb or so in traffic in a month, I'd love to see hard limits advertised rather than 'unlimited'.

I know that Dreamhost oversells on purpose, and that's fine, but I think they can still do that (though perhaps not quite as effectively) by just stating their upper limit. Of course, this means that more people are likely to hit or approach that upper limit, but at least they'll know when they need to grow into another 'slice' as it were, or whether or not to relocate from Dreamhost altogether.

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We (at DreamHost) don't state any explicit limits as they're pretty fluid in practice. The effective limits are basically:

* Don't use enough resources that you make it hard for us to provide good service to other customers. (Saturating the network / filling the filesystem = bad.)

* If you're legitimately using lots of resources, we'll move you around if you start getting near the limits on the hardware you're on, but we won't install new hardware just for you.

And, of course, you're also required to stay within the ToS, which exclude most of the really obvious ways of burning through lots of resources. (Public upload / mirror sites aren't permitted, pirated media is obviously a no-go, and you aren't allowed to use your "unlimited" disk space for content that isn't part of your site.) We've got some $10/month customers who are using insane amounts of resources; so long as they don't expand beyond what we can handle without building new infrastructure just for them, we're happy to keep them on.

What you're describing is exactly the problem. I don't want to worry about whether or not I'm exceeding some subjective limit, I want a hard number limit that I can compare to my actual usage.

Hmmm, I think the dreamhost guy gave a pretty good explanation. Thanks for that. But he seems to be getting downmodded (downmod if he's wrong; not if you disagree).

Yes, it's subjective ("doesn't require us to upgrade infra just for you"), but so what? If you want hard numbers, go with the ones which advertise hard limits.

Maybe it's just how I see it, but "unlimited" is a "hard limit". If you don't provide unlimited service, then say so, it's not rocket science.

What you want is easily available all over the place, at any scale you want.

All of it is going to cost you more than Dreamhost's incredibly cheap prices - which are only possible because of it's police, as the guy stated.

It seems unfair at first - especially to a technical person, it's misleading - but the reality of hosting is that you do need to actually pay for the resources you are going to use - and the internet isn't free. The more your business is worth, the more you should be spending on solid contracts, multiple sourcing and fault tolerance.

I think what your parent and I are in support of are something that can be guaranteed, regardless of price. If I have contractual obligations to people regarding my webhost's uptime and bandwidth, I want the webhost to give me something more than "It changes a lot, don't use too much".

When the barrier to entry for an internet-based business is so low, I expect ISPs and other service providers to understand this requirement, and provide plans and prices accordingly.

>What you want is easily available all over the place, at any scale you want.

Yes, but by not stating a limit, while still enforcing one at some point, you are effectively not allowing yourself to be compared with others.

It's cheating. Even a rough "approximate limit" would allow comparisons, but stating nothing is strictly cheating. Would Dreamhost allow me to run 100tb/day? 100pb/day? They don't say they won't... how do their prices compare against someone who would?

With those sorts of numbers (100 tb/day ≈ 10 Gbps, for instance), nobody can offer that amount of traffic under "unlimited" terms. One of the limitations I mentioned is that we won't upgrade infrastructure just to support individual customers, and this would definitely fall under those criteria.

Well then... what's the current up/down internet connection, after subtracting the average use? That's the limit (unless limited further by something else). Why not advertise it? It's probably huge.

I'm not sure I can give out exact numbers, but it's far in excess of what any single machine can push out, either practically or technically. Advertising it would be just as misleading as any other specific number. :)

>That's the limit (unless limited further by something else).

>... what any single machine can push out ...

That number wouldn't be very misleading, and could actually be useful - it's effectively the limit on a dumb fileserver. If their code results in a lower boundary, that's their fault, not yours, and not in the least incorrect because it's being restricted by them.

What we're up against is that providing raw numbers for usage limits leads to several problems. Among them:

1. Competition. If you provide N gigabytes of storage/bandwidth, another provider will offer N * 2, and they instantly look more competitive, even if they aren't even actually capable of providing that. So, back when we provided limited plans, we were constantly being forced to increase our resource promises to unrealistic levels just to avoid looking stingy.

2. Expectations. If you provide N gigabytes of whatever, customers will expect (and demand!) that their site be able to use up all of their provided resources. This is both on a policy level ("what do you mean I saturated the interface?") and on a technical level ("why can't I serve 100 gigabytes of dynamic HTML a month?") This becomes an increasing issue as competition drives the provides up, and the actual resources you're supposed to provide are absurdly high. (Consider for instance 100tb.com, which was mentioned earlier in this thread - good luck actually pushing 300+ MBit constantly.)

In practice, the policy we've got now actually works better in some ways for customers because they don't have to care whether they're exceeding resource limits, either subjective OR objective. So long as they're running a site which complies with our Terms of Service, we'll do our best to keep it going, even if it gets big.

I get that there's a strong disincentive to be the first company to impose caps, but would a court order not level the playing field? Or would everybody simply host overseas?

I'm curious, why don't you state limits on your site? You state "unlimited", when in fact it's not. You don't even have small print to cover yourself.

What if one of your customers end up taking you to court for breach of contract, of does your contract explain what you have just pointed out?

Why are you treating a random developer at a hosting company like he's the CEO? If Dreamhost gets taken to court, it's not his problem. He is just explaining what he actually does to make "unlimited" as unlimited as possible.

Company legal policies are not his domain, so it's probably a waste of effort to complain to him about it.

I see your point. But I didn't realise he was a developer, from the way he was talking, it sounded like he was in a position of authority at the company.

I see how you figured out he was an employee now, I'll be sure to do profile checks on people in the future to get a better frame of reference.

Our limits are based on policy, not numbers. The policy is (roughly) outlined at http://www.dreamhost.com/unlimited.html if you're curious.

DreamHost "solved" our problematic site by banning the search engine spiders from our site. Apparently we were being spidered too much so they changed the htaccess (without our knowledge) to ban them. But the site did stay up and I am sure we were using less resources after that. The site more or less dried up traffic wise.

One thing I'll say for Amazon is the explicitness of the cost for storage and bandwidth, coupled with the simple fact that my (and your) startup are very unlikely to get anywhere close to something they haven't seen, make AWS extremely attractive for any real deployment.

We had a Dreamhost account (have!), and briefly entertained using them for our rollout, but some simple number crunching and common sense made us see that Amazon was set up for the possibility that we would really have to scale, whereas Dreamhost was pretty much set up for casual work-at-home developers who were looking for absolute rock-bottom costs.

Seems like the simpleCDN guys made the opposite decision, and went with a company that markets XYZ rather than really looking under the hood. It's incumbent on any business to vette their vendors and understand the risks, rather than just point a finger and say "they promised!"

"* If you're legitimately using lots of resources, we'll move you around if you start getting near the limits on the hardware you're on, but we won't install new hardware just for you."

Could you define an "illegitimate use of resources"?

http://www.dreamhost.com/unlimited.html has details.

I beg to differ. I know that I've been well within the terms of service at all times, hosting only a semi-popular message board. I'll grant you that 30Gb of traffic in a month is doing well, however, that certainly comes nowhere close to saturating the network or filling the filesystem.

From your TOS, I should be fine so long as the intent of the site wasn't to do either.

For what it's worth, I generally recommend Dreamhost to people looking for small personal sites or new apps -- until they need to move, but it's my experience with DH that eventually they will need to move. As I've experienced on more than one occasion, the limits, ignoring the Unlimited + 50Gb claim, are enforced far more vigorously than you claim.

Personally, I think pay-for-use models a la Tarsnap and NearlyFreeSpeech.net are quite fair. I suppose most people will be put off by "mental transaction costs", though.

That might be a part of it, but I think the other part of it is that the average guy looking to start a blog, or website, or whatever, has absolutely no idea how much traffic his thing will generate. For people like that, the claims that Dreamhost makes are a godsend, as he doesn't have to worry about "what if I get a 1000 subscribers?"

Generally, I'm pleased as punch that Slicehost, Linode and Amazon came along, as now I have fair prices with real limits. If I outgrow them, I don't have to move, I just increase memory allocation, or grow the slice, or add a node, whatever.

Dreamhost couldn't get away with this because likely, 80% of their users are paying $9.95 a month for the equivalent of 25 cents worth of usage.

They are fine for joe average who wants to play around and start a blog.

They aren't fine if you want to deploy a web-scale infrastructure on top of them and make tons of money. That much should be obvious to anyone architecting such services.

Dreamhost however is very open about the type of `best effort, use what you like` model.

Compare the claims on http://vps.net/ to the reality of http://status.vps.net/

FYI status.vps.net doesn't include most outages they deem "too small" and only affect ~5% of customers. They only post there when it affects a large number.

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