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.

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).

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Market_fo...

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.

But, what is considered abusive uploading behavior?

Is it:

  (A) 100 Gigabytes/Month
  (B) 1 Terabyte/Month
  (C) 2 Terabytes/Month
  (D) 4 Terabytes/Month
  ...

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?

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")

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.

Bandwidth is a core part of their offering.