Yes, Yahoo has jumped in on the unlimited hosting bandwagon. For $11.95 a month (plus a $25 setup fee) you can grab a shared hosting account with unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited e-mail storage, and 1,000 email accounts.

Now usually with an offer like this, I would be pretty mad because they are selling a service they can not possibly deliver. There is no such thing as unlimited anything in the web hosting world. Now why has Yahoo still not gotten on my bad side yet? Well, unlike other hosting companies they spell out what “unlimited” really means.

What is the Catch?

First thing first, they prohibit hosting any files that are not linked with your web site your hosting. That is a good thing. With unlimited disk space they spell it out like this:

You can now create as large a site as you like (you won’t face an upper limit, or “ceiling”), but we will place some constraints on how fast you can grow. In other words, you can add as much content as you want, but maybe not all at once. The vast majority of our customers’ sites grow at rates well within our rules, however, and will not be impacted by this constraint.

The explanation for unlimited bandwidth is also along the same terms. The FAQ for that says…

In most cases, if you use our service appropriately, visitors to your web site will be able to download and view as much content from your site as they like. However, in certain circumstances, our server processing power, server memory, or anti-abuse controls could limit downloads from your site.

So I have to give Yahoo’s web hosting division a pat on the back for actually putting it down in writing what unlimited means.