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).
But, what is considered abusive uploading behavior?
Is it:
What's the downside to the customer of just spelling out the actual limits?