Hosts offering "unlimited websites"?

I’m comparing hosting providers, and I’m confused about some of the “unlimited” features. For example, webhostingbuzz.com claims to provide “unlimited websites” for as little as $6.95/month.

That sounds like I can sign up for one hosting account and have 10 different domains pointing to 10 separate websites.

Am I interpreting that incorrectly?

No, you interpreted that correctly, and a lot of hosts do that any more. So under your one hosting account, you can have 10 different domains/subdomain, etc and have them serve up different pages.

Usually your folder structure would resemble something like (via FTP):
/your user/domain1/
/your user/domain2/
etc.

That sure seems like a poor business model (for the hosting company).

Is there any downside for me, if I’m managing websites for multiple businesses?

The downside is that they are all in the one account so if you give anyone access to one of the sites they will have access to all of them. The fix for that downside is called a reseller account which costs a lot more but where the only extra feature provided is that each site will have its own secure area and access to one doesn’t give access to all.

Disk Usage Provision. 90% or more of your content on your website must be linked from an HTML or similarly coded web page where all content is freely available to the public. Your website consists of web pages of a standard design, essentially HTML based text and graphics. Downloadable files, media, streaming content or any file which consumes more than 500kb of space must not exceed 10% of your total used disk quota.

I would guess due to the restrictions above most of the websites will be quite small as will the bandwidth usage. I have six sites ( not with this host ) and they are all functional and do the job the smallest is 1.7MB and the largest is 54MB.
If you have ten of the larger size that is only around 540MB on their server. I suppose it is swings and roundabouts for the hosts; most sites will be small and a few people may have a few large ones.

Hmm… that isn’t true for the host I use (and I have a shared account and a VPS account), but you’d have to look at closer at the features or ask, as when I looked at webhostingbuzz, it didn’t exactly say if you can setup different user accounts for each site.

You can actually have 40 or 50 different domains with most shared hosting sellers. However if the number of files gets too large or if the traffic you have impacts the cpu, the host will throttle or suspend your account or limit it in different ways, it depends on the host.

Typically, with cPanel you can set up unique ftp accounts that will limit access to a portion of your site if you outsource work on one.

With all web hosts (especially those touting “unlimited” this and that) it’s always worth looking at their AUP (Acceptable Usage Policy) to see any restrictions that are in force, see http://www.webhostingbuzz.com/acceptable-use-policy.php for instance. Also worth checking their T&C’s for other stuff.

A shared hosting account that allows you access to set up multiple accounts within the one is generally called a reseller account and usually costs several times that which a shared hosting account that doesn’t have that feature costs. Even with that feature it is still usually cheaper than a VPS because you are still sharing the server with a larger number of other accounts and also sharing some of the programs.

Yes but once they connect in there’s nothing preventing them going up a level to get access to the entire account. While the FTP account starts in the particular folder and at first glance looks like that is all it has access to, it actually has access to the entire account.

More often than not, at a low price point hosting companies band unlimited around to catch peoples attention but dont really mean it - there is always a limit somewhere. This is where they get you to upgrade to the higher packages.

Well usually its not truly unlimited. Most hosts offering “unlimited” plans are really limited as per their TOS. If you read that closely, usually they say that accounts under unlimited Plan shall not exceed X number of inodes (files). Usually the figure is high say around 1,00,000 to 5,00,000. To take that into perspective a normal WP or Joomla installation would be anywhere from 5k to 10k files. But then you add images, media etc and usually most of them have auto thumbnail so it would create 3-5 different files of the same file. So say if you run a media related site and say showcase 1000 projects then just the images would be 5k. Given that under unlimited plan one could easily host 10-25 normal sites without major issues. Also you need to remember that its shared hosting so it would have effect on overall performance as file size of each individual user increases. Also most such sites have a policy not to host client sites. Best would be to buy “reseller” hosting plans where in each user would be given a specific area and cpanel and that individual account would have the limits you set for that account.

you better opt for reseller hosting if you like to have separate users accounts with cpanel. hostgators reseller hosting packages are good. otherwise godaddy deluxe hosting is best to host multiple websites.