Hi,

I was wondering if you could give me some advice about a good hosting company for my Zenphoto gallery.

I subscribed last week to Hostpapa because of their ads on this website, and because they say they are the best Zenphoto hosting. I chose their unlimited plan, and I thought it was not an issue at all to host my gallery with 500GB of images.
I wanted to let them know in order to allow them to anticipate their resource allocation, but as soon as they knew that I have 500GB of images, they told me that it is too big for their unlimited plan (lol) and they can't host my gallery. They suggested to host the images of a G Suite unlimited plan, much more expensive!
And how can I trust that this one will be really unlimited?
And how can I be sure that Zenphoto will work correctly (I had in mind that Zenphoto is entirely file system based and is made for self hosting on the same server)?

Anyway, it seems they don't want to host my gallery because their unlimited plan is actually limited somewhere between 100GB and 500GB but they continue to say that it is unlimited; except for images... Pretty fun since they are presenting themselves as the best Zenphoto hosting...

So, I guess that maybe some of you guys are in the same situation as me and have the same kind of volume to host. What hosting company did you choose? Which plan, and which cost?

Thanks a lot for help on this.

Sebastien

500 GB of images is of course quite a number and will most likely exceed any shared hosting plan. You will never find true unlimited space as any host will calculate that based on the usual size (just like with internet connection flat rates which certainly have a limit if you really use it to the extreme). For example I don't know any local German host (we use a German one for our site) that dares to offer unlimited space at all.

For that size you will need your own virtual private or even dedicated server most likely. Especially if that size might grow in the future and you need the performance. Shared webhosting plans are also limited in resources naturally.

Surpass Hosting ( https://www.surpasshosting.com/ ) seems to have some shared hosting plans that offer unlimited storage ($30/Mo). I have a 500 GB limit on my plan. But, I'm not even using 5 Gigs of space with all my websites combined.

Thanks for your feedback.
Finally I just cancelled my subscription to HostPapa, since their technical team clearly told me that they can't deliver a proper service as soon as we have more than 50GB of data (backup not working anymore) and that my account would be sooner or later suspended because of the high amount of storage.
The support guy told me " it is not wise to store 500GB on a shared plan". But is it wise to sell hosting plans with unlimited storage? He didn't reply...
I will try to test some other hosting solutions and let you know as soon as I find one that we can trust.

The support guy told me " it is not wise to store 500GB on a shared plan".

From the technical point of view he is right. And at least they seem honest about what they support.

But is it wise to sell hosting plans with unlimited storage?

It is probably written in their terms of service somewhere. It is clrealy a marketing claim as no "normal webhosting" user will have that much storage. But they also don't have to worry about a GB more. With your amount of storage requirement you are normally reaching professional usage where shared hosting is not the right plan. I think it is not the storage itself but what happens if that much content gets much traffic of hundred or thousands visitors.