This is how business between ordinary people is usually done.
Paper napkins are free at every restaurant I've ever been to, but that doesn't mean that they'll give me a truckload of them in one visit.
To me it's a little different than a local ISP advertising "unlimited internet" or wireless carrier advertising "unlimited data" and then putting artificial caps and throttles on it. That's typically a home's only data pipe or a mobile device is on a long contract.
But there's much more competition for virtual servers and we all know our server infrastructures can be migrated to a different provider at the drop of a hat. Oh wait. :-)
Restaurants rarely advertise "free unlimited napkins with any meal". They include them gratis, within reason.
Nobody can provide "free unlimited" anything. There are always limits. In Australia, these claims could run afoul of consumer protection laws, with good reason - anybody claiming to sell "free unlimited" anything is lying. OK, Linode probably means well. But before you know it, every company will match them, and you won't be able to figure out which "free unlimited" plan suits your purpose because all the limits are hidden behind a "within reason" clause in the fine print.
"Free unlimited" offers turn the whole thing into what Scott Adams calls a "Confusopoly", in which companies stop competing on value by hiding what value they actually offer.
Something similar has occurred with LCD monitors, all companies advertise stats that are grossly misleading like "dynamic contrast ratio" and "grey to grey response times", but sound similar to the legitimate measurements like contrast and response times.
These fake numbers are much more impressive sounding than the "real" ones (1:100000 dynamic contrast ratio (DCR), vs something like 1:10000 regular contrast ratio (CR), when infact the monitor with a 1:10000 CR could be greatly superior to the 1:1000000 DCR monitor, which may easily only have a 1:1000 CR), so companies that provide the real numbers are penalized in the marketplace, so instead start to only publish the misleading numbers. This has made it all but impossible to meaningfully compare screens on manufacturer provided stats.
Information asymmetry plays a powerful role in marketing, and can result in a race to the bottom where consumers cannot compare things in real terms before purchase, so providers have no incentive to deliver anything of quality (extra costs, no meaningful way to market the extra quality as an option). This sort of behavior is also extremely common in residential ISPs ("unlimited" internet always sounds better to the average consumer than some kind of published limit).
Yeah, at one time the US FTC cared enough to enforce honest reporting of CRT sizes back in the old days. Apparently they don't care about LCD stats though.
All they say is that no matter how much you use you will never have to pay for it (at least that's how I read it). Obviously they can't guarantee that they will be able to offer you an unlimited amount of inbound bandwidth (there is no such thing!). Do note that they make no guarantees about the speed of your inbound connection either.
The same goes for other things, of course. You can't necessarily get unlimited outbound bandwidth and you can't buy an unlimited number of servers from them and so on... Sure, those limits (both quality and availability) aren't stated explicitly, but I still think it's fair to say that "whatever amount of inbound traffic you use we won't charge you for it". In extreme cases they will need to do something, but there are other options. There's a certain value in keeping things simple and flexible.
I do agree, though, that hiding (important) limits is generally not a good thing to do.
There might truly be no limit. Let's assume that Linode has to buy its bandwidth symmetrically. If someone can confirm whether that is true or false, it would greatly be appreciated. With that assumption in hand, I think we can add the assumption that a web hosting company mostly does outbound traffic - people downloading things from their servers, not the other way around. They might have so much spare inbound capacity that it really wouldn't matter.
Plus, there's a small "what goes up must come down" logic to it. So, you get a Linode and you start pushing as much inbound traffic to it as you can. How much can you push to it for any purpose you can see as useful (useful being defined as something other than testing whether Linode will consider you abusive at some point)? The largest Linode (costing $800/mo) only comes with 800GB of storage. At that point, you need to push some of that data outgoing or delete it before you can really take more inbound data. You could run a service that was 24-hour YouTube - a site where a video uploaded would only be available for 24 hours and then deleted. Of course, the point of that site would be for people to watch it which would be outbound traffic.
The reason they might not be stating a limit is that there might not be a limit. Rather, I should say that you're going to be limited by storage. There's no point in taking the data if you have no place to put it and I can't really think of pulling in data that one would want to store for such short periods of time that it would put a strain on their network. This isn't rhetorical: how would you see yourself or someone taking inbound traffic on a Linode that wouldn't similarly see that traffic go outbound or need to be stored?
> This isn't rhetorical: how would you see yourself or someone taking inbound traffic on a Linode that wouldn't similarly see that traffic go outbound or need to be stored?
In general I think your argument is pretty strong, but I _can_ think of a use-case: if you were analyzing the data, and reporting very brief aggregate results.
Say, have swarms of web browser extensions uploading all the domain names their users are requesting pages from, and then sending to a single user, once per hour, the list of the domains, and how many users requested each.
Edit: oh, look, a few comments lower on the page, other users came up with the same example (search "telemetry")
What's the downside to the customer of just spelling out the actual limits?
Lots of customers have no idea, and most of the time it doesn't matter. It's a friction that just isn't needed for most customers.
Abusive uploading behavior isn't a line, it's a grey area. If you are paying for 30 servers, then the line is in a different place to if you are paying for one.
Yeah, the optimal place for the system as a whole is when it "just works" for everybody. If you put limits and overages in the contract, the the customer may get penalized (or at least subconsciously feel the need to restrict his consumption of your service).
Paper napkins are free at every restaurant I've ever been to, but that doesn't mean that they'll give me a truckload of them in one visit.
To me it's a little different than a local ISP advertising "unlimited internet" or wireless carrier advertising "unlimited data" and then putting artificial caps and throttles on it. That's typically a home's only data pipe or a mobile device is on a long contract.
But there's much more competition for virtual servers and we all know our server infrastructures can be migrated to a different provider at the drop of a hat. Oh wait. :-)