Could a site like Facebook, Twitter or Youtube run off of a HostGator account?

[Mr Clickyy]

HostGator memberships come with unlimited bandwidth, unlimited emails & domains. Couldn't high traffic websites run off of them, or is there a reason why not? Thank you.

[Chris]

No. "Unlimited hosting" is a marketing gimick. HostGator and other "unlimited" hosts have conditions in the terms of service that prevent users from using too high a quantity of a servers resources. To see the exact limitations you can read the TOS or I have an article at http://hostgatorhub.com/hostgator-limits/.

If you're interested in a more complete explanation of HostGator's overselling, I wrote an article about it at http://hostgatorhub.com/hostgator-unlimi...erselling/

Although a site like Facebook could never be hosted on HostGator's shared plans, there are people who manage to use over a terabyte of bandwidth on the shared plans--this is a huge amount for $10ish per month, but not every user will be able to get near that without running into problems.