Here’s one thing to know.
As a hosting company owner (not uk based) i see these questions alot. The one thing you want to be very critical is any host that says ‘unlimited bandwidth and/or server space’ because it’s simply not true.
Here’s the bottom line and I hate that hosting companies avoid this so badly. There is no such thing as unlimited anything. It all costs. What you’ll find is those companies that offer that claim it’s true. But they’ll also say in their ToS that 1. they can cancel you at any time for any reason, or 2. that your restricted on resources (this is the most common).
The thing is, you’re restricted to the amount of CPU/RAM usage they feel is fair. a busy site thats running vBulletin is going to see a lot of MySQL usage and that can run the RAM usage up fast. If you are uploading gigs and gigs of data the assumption is that you’re also going to be using a substantial amount of system resources. What most companies will say somewhere burried in a ToS is that you cannot use more than X% of the total system resources on that machine. You’d be hard pressed to do any huge uploads or use big bandwidth without going over those numbers too.
That’s a common tactic in advertising and I think it’s a really bad way to do business. It’s lying in reality because you are not really unlimited. Think about it. bandwidth costs money. so does hard drive space. Now, to a host that’s somewhat inconsequential because the real bear is system resources. Big companies have large clusters which have tons of space, and bandwidth is dirt cheap now. But don’t be fooled. Nothing it ever unlimited in the hosting industry.
Now, I should also say that a company that says this isn’t always a bad place. In this industry it’s VERY competitive and people (just like they should) want the best deal. So sometimes good companies use bad tactics and it’s a shame.
You get what you pay for in most cases. The truth? You will probably find much better service from a company that has a somewhat small cap. 1 or 2 gigs of space is a LOT in reality.
The other thing to recognize. Any company offering these crazy limits are also very easily affected by overselling. In this business you will find that 99% of the customers use almost no space, and very little bandwidth. Well the business model knows this. so a good company will know that of all their customers the average uses X% of the space on the drives. So if that percentage is really low they can sell much more space than they actually have. That’s really the only way we can stay in business. NOBODY in hosting sells only what they give. otherwise you’d go broke. It’s just like the airlines. They know that 90% of booked passengers show up. So they can actually sell a flight to 110% because based on their averages they will still fill the plane up. Same process with hosting. But those companies that offer ridiculous space and bandwidth limits are much more susceptible to overselling higher than normal.
Do your research with this stuff. Dreamhost is a great example. they offer insane amounts of space and bandwidth. But I can’t count how many customers they sent me because as soon as your site starts getting busy and uses a lot of resources (CPU, RAM Etc) they get cut off and cancelled.