Can you sue your hosting company?

The answer to your question would depend entirely on your local legal system.

In some countries it is acceptable to claim that something is unlimited and then hide the fact that it isn't in small print. In others countries unlimited means unlimited.

Good luck in any case, as there are few things more irritating than something like this wrecking what you have worked so hard for.

I would definitely talk to a lawyer. Whenever you signed up to do business with the company (or upgraded your service), you agreed to certain terms and conditions (you know, all the "fine print" ). Only a lawyer would be able to tell you if they have violated anything. But, if you're going to lose as much money as you say, paying a lawyer for a few hours of his time would be well worth it IMO!

The chances are they have a watertight contract in place if they are a professional company and that would cover just this kind of situation.

Instead of going head to head with them how about trying to move up the company ladder and speaking with one of the supervisors/managers or even the directors. Explain the situation and how you've been a loyal customer for years and ask what they can do to help you out.

If they still can't come up with a better timescale at least you'll be no worse off than you are now. And, of course, they might just do something to turn things around.

Good luck,

Nigel

It doesn't matter how water tight their contract is, your location still matters.

An Irish example: Recently there was a case in Ireland where a phone company tried to charge a consumer thousands for going over their hidden restrictions.

The original advert had said unlimited minutes, and the court ruled that as the small print was in direct conflict with that premise, and that the consumer had not been specifically shown that section of the fine print, he didn't owe them one cent.

An English example: When I was back in England I wanted to take a fridge freezer back to the shop because it didn't work.

They said that by signing their guarantee I had waived my statutory rights (meaning I could have it replaced by some other company but couldn't just take it back). I was actually studying the law at the time, so went home and got my books. I brought them in and showed the manager the section where it explained that statutory rights could not be waived, regardless of any contracts that may have been made to the contrary. I got my money back.

Definitely talk to a lawyer and find out what the law says in your area. In some cases, the contract you have virtually signed may not be valid due to national laws. It all depends on where you are.

I think you are getting some good advice here about getting legal advice. You may want to upgrade right now with them, just to get your sites back online. After that, seek out another hosting company. I wouldn't contact them with hostility and anger, it will only get them to get defensinve and toughen their stance. Get a new hosting company, move everything over, and boom, dump them and hit them with legal action if you won't lose money.

I think the best way to hurt a business is to let them hurt themselves. I never go at them with guns blazing, it just makes them defensive. I find an alternative and let everyone know how great the alternative is - and don't even mention the other company.

I hope it all works out for you,
Scott

This is horrible. The only advice I can give you is, if you have a chance, pull out your business from them and transfer to a more cheap but reliable company like hostgator, or any other top 10 webhosts..

Clearly you need a lawyer (and I'm not one), but looking at it superficially, on the basis of your explanation above, I'd think you'd have a far, far better cause of action for suing them for breach of (implied terms of) contract than you have in tort, i.e. for negligence. If the facts don't amount to a breach of contract, I'd think it's extremely unlikely they'll substantiate negligence.

I'm also guessing that you'd be better placed (in most jurisdictions, anyway) regarding the quantum of damages, what's deemed to be "reasonably foreseeable and recoverable damage" and their willingness to settle out of court, in contract law than in tort law, too. It would be pretty unusual to have a contract with someone, and to try to sue them for negligence rather for breach of contract, over actions they took connected with that contract. :confused:

you can sue anyone for any reason which is not the issue. winning in the court is what matters. in your situation, i would say yuo dont stand a chance against your hosting company and i will give you my reason.

lot of hosting companies oversell their disk space and/or bandwidth. they will say its unlimited space or unlimited bandwidth but there is fineprint you will need to look at. the fine print will say its unlimited bandwidth as long as your site doesn't cause any server downtime or doesn't slow down the server. if your site causes other sites to load slow or make the server overwork, they can take down your site.

hosting companies know what they are doing and every single word you read on their site or on any other print media passes through their legal team to make sure there is no future liability. the way they do it is unethical cause thats false advertisement not disclosing the entire fact upfront but they have it written somewhere which no one reads (or cant find it easily)

well, you can sue them. but the question is:
1) will you win the case?
2) even you won, will you get what you claimed?

1) probably, in their service term, there are some lines about the site down. it is supposed to protect them. so, I guess, it is difficult for you to win the case.

2) collect $ is always difficult, that's the simple fact.

so, I think a better solution is: pay the dedicated server month by month now, and find another hosting.

seems better, easier, and less loss.


good luck

david

In the US, hosts usually SPECIFICALLY disclaim ANY responsibility on their part. They SPECIFICALLY rule out any liability due to actions or inaction, etc... NOTHING is unlimited, and limits are often spelled out WITHIN the contract.

That said, if you can PROVE your site is reasonable, and you didn't get much traffic, you can sue them on the basis of bait and switch or just plain FRAUD! Of course with 4K of weekly profits, that may be hard to prove!

As for anything ELSE? You probably don't have a case.

Of course, like anything else, many lawyers will twist things, etc... and MAKE a case. So how good is your lawyer? THEIR lawyer would probably have an easier time with reasonable care, disclosure, standard business practices, etc...

Steve

Yeah, that's a lesson I had to learn the hard way. Always good to have a backup

BTW last time I checked, admittedly it WAS several years ago... Godaddy appeared to be CHEAP, but the service was pretty worthless. It would scale up as they nickle and dimed you. Since bandwidth was/is one of the best ways to drive prices up, I DOUBT it was ever unlimited.

Verizon recently told me that I should KEEP their service, because I was grandfathered in as "unlimited". I kept pushing the guy, and he ADMITTED that if I consistently did over about 7GB/month, that I would likely lose it! Their limit for "unlimited" is 5GB. I probably had a couple 12GB months, and certainly a few 7GB! And NETZERO told me they never wanted to do business with me again, EVEN IF I PAID! WHY? I took them on their word of UNLIMITED!

Steve

What hosting company?

BTW since you say you make SO much, just get a FULL dedicated server with a 100Mbps unmetered/unthrotled connection! Play your cards right, and you may NEVER have a problem again! I think they cost like $300/month, but IMAGINE! If you had FULL CDs to be downloaded, and an average of 10 customers a minute, the CDs could take about 60 SECONDS a piece! If they sold for $100/piece, you could conceivably make $51,264,000 a year, and everyone would be ASTOUNDED at how fast it was! GRANTED, that is if all could keep up but still... I DOUBT you could get that kind of throughput as cheaply any other way.

Steve

Well, there HAVE been places that offered unlimited mysql databases. MYSQL can get touchy though and, improperly used, CAN eat up CPU! And bandwidth often IS the cause of shutdowns! On POPULAR sites, I bet bandwidth is the reason like 60% of the time! Of course, a lot of people DO use a LOT of CPU, and THEY will get shut down.

But it would be ILLEGAL for a DEDICATED site to be shut down for CPU usage! WHY? Because DEDICATED SERVER means that whole server is DEDICATED to YOU! That means that they are not supposed to care about processing AT ALL! If they did, it would be a breach of contract! Even a VPS server has allocated CPUs and resources and shouldn't be a problem.

A SHARED server is totally different because, at any one time, anyone can use 100% of the resources, at least within quota limits. Unlimited systems generally have NO such hard quotas! You are on your honor, and they PRAY that you overestimate your needs. If you don't watch it, and use more than they planned for, YOU pay!

So WHY would a DEDICATED SERVER get shut down? BANDWIDTH usage, or excessive emailing would be the primary reasons.

Steve

And that's what most buyers don't understand about "unlimited bandwidth" on a shared hosting account. Unlimited bandwidth is meaningless because most hosting accounts have limited CPU usage and limited file downloads in their TOS (Terms of service). There is nothing wrong with shared hosting but buyers need to understand and be aware of this. I am surprised on a VPS (semi-shared server?) that you would be a CPU hog. You must have one butt-kicking bring on the traffic site or they have really bad servers. Print out the TOS and read it. It's worth the time.
Scott

There is a lot of excellent information in here from people who know.

If it was me, I would do as they instructed and buy a better plan - elsewhere - and I would also:

Make sure all of my data was backed up daily.

Plan for future expansion.

Create a contingency plan and test it.

Keep in mind - there is no such thing as "unlimited" anything on the internet. How they claim that and get away with it is beyond me. I know Blockbuster or NetFlix did get in trouble for it a few years ago with "unlimited" rentals, which was mathematically impossible given 3 movies at a time and the time to mail. They did have to change the ads.

Often on hosting, the shutdowns (as you indicated in the edited original post) have to do with CPU usage and not traffic.

Many scripts - particularly auto-blogging scripts - bog down the CPU and RAM and can crash the server, effecting not just you but other customers as well. You certainly would not want your site down based on another user. That is the main reason I've seen people's sites taken down.

Rarely is it the bandwidth (we all wish we could drive that much traffic). Usually it is the CPU or RAM usage.

Glad you have resolution to your issue. Before anyone goes to an attorney, always, always read the fine print of the fine print. There is bound to be some clause in there that holds the company 'not responsible'.

But, hey, perhaps some insurance company could consider a 'lost business' policy for things such as this. Hmmm...

This is great that you got this resolved... Although I never heard of a hosting problem like that before.

"High CPU usage" mostly means "high database load" - it is hard to overload CPU with a "normal" website unless you have a lot of image / video / audio processing on the server.

So for me it sounds like you need to optimize your database calls and cache everything you can to reduce DB load.

I have got a warning from my host regarding one of my larger websites (over 100.000 database entries and around 20k visitors per day) regarding the CPU load. So i have spent an evening by implementing caching for all pages (they are now updated every hour) and that cut down the CPU usage by like 90%. This might save you a lot of money in the long run and also make the site faster (but takes some space on the server's hard drive)

Sounds like you may have a claim, but is it worth it? Remember the burden of proof is on you, and what do you stand to gain from a law suit?

Miles

If you asked the right questions before choosing a host you would not have ended up in this situation.

Its likely that buried somewhere in their terms of service that you accepted when signing up. Here are some example terms for another UNRELATED company that offers unlimited hosting:

When choosing an economy provider you need to ask them things like:

How many concurrent connections am I allowed? (the answer at Godaddy is as little as 50).

How many mysql queries per hour am I allowed? (the answer at some hosts will shock you).

What happens if I use too much resources?

Do you give ample warnings?

What is the upgrade process?

---

Ultimately the word "unlimited" used by most hosting companies is an unfair advertising practice that I think should really be banned. They use the word unlimited in their advertising in the same way that Verizon wireless uses it to describe 5gb of data.

Its designed to deceive people into thinking they are getting something that they are not.

But I don't lay all the blame on the hosting providers... I think most of the blame for these kind of surprises lays with the consumer who did not read the TOS when they agreed to them and who did not ask the hard questions before choosing a hosting provider.

If you want truly unlimited go with Amazon. If you want burstable and scalable go with a hosting company that owns their own data centers and provides you a clear path for growth. Establish your goals early with your account rep and plan for what you will do when you need more resources.

Don't put traffic intensive or bandwidth intensive or resource intensive or database intensive applications on shared hosts.

Check out SoftLayer for dedicated options they just acquired the planet. That is a pro hosting company. Integrate various Amazon services for scaling etc.

Last but not least once you have honed down your choices and gotten clear answers about various limitations from people at the companies who were not just guessing (that is difficult to do)... then do you own due diligence. Search google. See what others are saying. Check out Web hosting talk forum and see what the hosting companies reputation is there.

WOW, "number of MYSQL queries per hour"? Only an IDIOT could dream that kind of limitation up! I'm sure Josh is talking about something HE saw, so I am not calling HIM an idiot, but the writer of the policy!

I mean a query on a small table may take practically NO time at all! It could be less than a millisecond! That is 1 THOUSANDTH of a second! A query on a large unindexed table COULD conceivably take FOREVER! I mean it could take hours and, before it is done, be closed improperly and have all resources allocated until it is actually killed! And I have not seen ANY facility to limit or, on such systems, really monitor such usage! So such a policy is STUPID and UNREASONABLE! It helps NOBODY!

Even concurrent connections is unreasonable. The HOST, on a shared server, has control over that, via HTTP/S and MYSQL settings! The customer usually does NOT! And AGAIN, connections by themselves do NOT indicate resource use. In fact connections on LINUX/APACHE/MYSQL are FREE, so resource usage is the ONLY cost! M/S SQL server, ORACLE, etc... on the other hand, often price the license according to connections.

In fact many, like M/S SQL allow up to 2 connections, per system, for FREE!!!!! They do this because 1-2 connections on a server is pretty much WORTHLESS, BUT developers can use it to develop software so the database has support so they can sell the USEFUL versions for a LOT!

When I write software for servers, I use 1-4 connections. sometimes I access tables based on other tables, and older MYSQL instances work best with multiple connections for such things, and 4 levels is about as deep as I have had to go. Those versions didn't have outer joins, complex joins, cursors, etc... But SOME people write software that opens up a connection per table or per query, and that can add up! It is improper, but hosts should allow it if it doesn't use too many resources.

The EXPENSIVE conversion software I use in my main job opens a connection for almost EVERY database object! That means potentially 50+ connections PER PROCESS! And that is on software that costs over $100K USD and is used by HUGE corporations that may have to pay for EVERY connection. I worked at one customer where we weren't allowed to look at their databases because the processes used almost ALL of the 1000 connections they were licensed for in Oracle!

BTW I am NOT saying that the above mentioned software is good, etc... I am just showing how popular such garbage is. In the above software, I complained a LOT that they should pool connections, etc... Most people, like myself, take measures to mitigate it. But in software *I* write, I try to limit such things. Still, 4 connections means 4 PER PROCESS! If 50 visitors do the same thing, that could be 200 connections RIGHT THERE!

Steve

BTW regarding what Josh said. Saying UNLIMITED, for such things, IS illegal! It has been for DECADES! I mean before I was even BORN! Perhaps before ANYONE here was born! Verizon FINALLY realized that, and is backing down. Netzero changed things. But they set it high enough so 80% of their customers don't know the truth, and most of the other 20% never make a federal case out of it, so they get away with it.

Call the FTC, report them, and it MAY ****LITERALLY**** become a federal case! They may be hauled into court by the FEDERAL government, sued, fined, and forced to make their policy CLEAR!

It may not solve YOUR problem, but you may get payback!

Steve

This isn't as much to respond to the original question as to hopefully add to the education of others that read this thread.

Shared hosting is essentially a shell game. Having been on both sides of the fence, I can appreciate your concerns as a customer, and understand the approach taken by most if not all hosting companies.

I will explain what I mean by "shell game".

The vast majority of web sites out there are not the sort of sites warriors are dealing with. They are primarily "Vanity" or "personal" sites. That is, they exist for purely personal reasons and rarely see much real traffic. Many don't even use a database because the site owners don't even know what one is. The concept of selling "unlimited bandwidth" or "unlimited storage" to these folks works for the host because they can still stack a hundred or more sites on a single server without reaching limits of the server, from storage, bandwidth or even cpu usage. A pure data server will usually max the bandwidth of the external connections far before it hits the cpu limits, unless it is a single cpu server. (I haven't personally seen a single cpu server in operation for over 6 years, though I know they are still sold).

The shell game is the promise of unlimited resources, based on the huge volumes of sites that essentially do nothing for years. It's a bet every hosting provider makes and they make money on it. Think for a moment what it costs for the connections and equipment. Start with a server. A decent multiprocessor server loaded with hard drives will cost you at least $5,000. Amortized over a two year life (I know, they are run longer, but let's be reasonable about it) that's about $210 per month, plus electricity to run it and a connection to the internet (which is the real cost. You'll see in a moment why the hardware cost isn't the bit issue.) However, just from the hardware standpoint, at $10 per month, you need 21 clients to break even. Add electricity cost, and you are probably near 26 clients, and a decent connection to the internet and you are at 50 to 75 clients per machine, just to break even. Now add the costs of the infrastructure, air conditioning, security and IT staff, and you're starting to get the idea. The break even point for many hosting providers is around 100 clients per server. They really need all those vanity and personal sites that just sit there if they are going to make any money in the hosting game...

The issue of the TOS is a real one, and I'd be surprised if half of the people that sign up for a web site could actually understand what the TOS says or means, if they bothered to actually read them. Here, I would a far higher number of warrors to understand them, but I'd guess the actual number that have read them is in the single digit percentages.

Why would I say this? Well, when I was working on a hosting server farm, I had timers set to show how long the TOS page was viewed before the "I agree" box was checked and the "next" button was pressed. You might be surprised to know that the times we saw were so short most people obviously didn't even scan the TOS. Only a very small percentage of people spent enough time to read them. (I've noticed some companies now provide a download link for them.) Average time on the entire page was under 20 seconds, and with a multipage TOS, I know it takes a lot longer than that to even scan.

Now, as a hosting provider, you can put nearly anything you want in your TOS to "define" what you mean by "unliminted" but basically, what most hosting companies tend to rely on is to provide "unlimited bandwidth", and provide limits on cpu usage. Often this is with very vague wording, so if you aren't careful, you may still be mislead on what their intent is.

The fact of the hosting world is that on AVERAGE they can afford to provide unlimited bandwidth, because the one or maybe two accounts on a given server that actually have any decent traffic will be balanced by the vast majority that just sit there and do nearly nothing. Every hosting provider has internal information (they won't share with anyone) that tells them the absolute bandwidth and cpu utilization of every server. First pass if they have a client that is using a bit more than they'd like is to move them to a relatively underutilized server (if they value your account). If you are on the low tiers of service (under say, $100 a month) they probably won't even bother to do that. If they find servers are really under-utilized, they will add more users until the numbers come up. Disk storage is so cheap these days, that they can afford to put a couple of hundred (vanity or personal) clients on a single server.

What's wrong with this?

Well, along comes a warrior that develops a successful site. Not only his bandwidth goes up, but so does the cpu, and often a lot more than the bandwidth. Wordpress is easy to use but it does extract a heavy cpu load because of the MySQL back end and the lack of decent caching (unless you have a cache plug-in installed). If you are curious, check the time it takes for random pages of your site to load. Add a caching plug-in like W3 Super Cache and then check the time it takes for pages to load. Less time because the database doesn't need to be accessed.

Wordpress is easy to use, but if you know HTML, you can provide the same features by flat-coding the site and run a much deeper/wider site on low cpu without any complaints from your hosting provider. Of course, you can't do too much to drop the bandwidth except avoiding high bandwidth things like videos (and that's not going to happen).

If your problem truly is bandwidth and not cpu usage, then perhaps using a service like s3.amazonaws.com could be helpful in reducing your download bandwidth (especially if you have a lot of video traffic for your sales or opt-in pages.)

It's really amazing how much the whole hosting world has changed in the last 10 years or so. As the amount of video and other high bandwidth, high database utilization sites come online, it will change even more. Just watch, the next steps will be charging you for your actual bandwidth use. It's already happening in Canada... Service providers are being forced to change the USER model to a paid bandwidth one, instead of the current relatively unlimited one. (Historically, this is sort of a return to the way things were in the "old days", but many people weren't affected by it so they don't remember.) This will likely extend to the server side as well as time goes on. In one manner of speaking, it already is in place, because of the cost of the high bandwidth connections used by most hosting providers, but what I'm concerned about is "metered" service. I'm hoping it will be inexpensive enough to have little impact on the business side of things.

Let me make it REALLY simple, even if rickfrazier1 said much the same.

A company may have a 3Ghz zeon, with 400GB, and a 10Mbps connection. Actually, I bet that isn't TOO far from something that might be average. They may determine that it could handle 10 websites. Since they KNOW many will never use it, they may get 100 customers for that system. OK, for 100users, if they shared EQUALLY, it is 4GB per user! You KNOW the average person historically doesn't have much on their site, so 3Ghz sounds reasonable. And the 10Mbps will usually just SLOW DOWN. So they figure if a person is allowed to use 400GB, etc... it is "virtually unlimited".

They HAVE to do such things to give you a months hosting for like $5USD or LESS!

The PROBLEM is that free software has become popular and boosted the base level. People that would have used maybe 100K may now use 10MB, or MORE! The CPU usage goes up. People are SCAMMED into believing that TRAFFIC means SALES! SO, instead of having 100 visits that might bring in 80 sales, they bring in 10000 visits that might bring in 8 sales! MYSQL used to be a nice almost LUXURY for higher end users. I remember when FREE software was almost all flat file, and MYSQL software cost money, and often cost 5 TIMES what the flat file version cost.

Of course, SOME people may use FAR more than 4GB! I had ONE TABLE that was over 2GB! ONE table out of HUNDREDS! MOST were smaller, but that one table? WOW! And TODAY, people have VIDEOS and CDs on their machines. Just one CD could be almost 1GB! A DVD could be SEVERAL GB!

BTW the Airlines in the US work the SAME way! On a 100seat plane, they track only about 80 seats! That leaves 20, and they may then sell 40 or 60 seats! So a 100seat plane may have 140 seats sold! Since they sell so far in advance, some people change plans, or are late. If they are lucky, they will have NO excess passengers. If they do, there are 3 "legal" recourses! I quoted legal because it is legal ONLY because they got the FAA to codify it.

1. Place the ones without assignments on another flight.
2. Hold an auction to get passengers with a seat assignment to give them up for a later flight.
3. FORCE passengers with a seat assignment to give them up for another flight.

And WHAT happens if the 20 seats that they never REALLY put up for sale don't get sold? Remember, they do NOT count as assigned seats. Well, they use those to handle worst case scenarios if other seats are oversold.

Check out passengers at an airport sometimes. Some will be on standby, or not have assigned seats. Stay there long enough, and you will hear gates requesting people to give up their seats. They may EVEN offer dinner, a hotel, AND a $300+ voucher for a flight! YOU may fail to get a seat, that the ticket agent at the airport QUICKLY gives you because "the seat was locked out on the website". NOW, you know why!

Steve