Utterly Disappointed And Frustrated with Hostgator - Anyone Facing The Same Issues?

you need to upgrade to a dedicated server sorry but thats the next step and if you plan on being even more successful take a even higher plan.

George, Then spend a day's worth of that income on a dedicated server. ALL shared hosting plans have this same "issue."

If you're on a dedicated server already, you're pushing one hell of a lot of bandwidth. 300+ gigs a day, unless my math is screwed up. (All HG dedicateds offer 10TB/mo.)

And they won't shut down a dedicated server over processor issues.


Paul

I've had this happen with a few other web hosting services as well.

The solution is to upgrade to a higher plan, even a dedicated server, if your
needs warrant it.

All success
Dr.Mani

Why should they give you any "notice"? How would you feel if you had a site on a server and it went down for a "few hours" because someone else on the server suddenly got a ton of traffic and hadn't bothered investing in a dedi?

If I were them, I would do exactly the same thing. Seems harsh, but when you have 200 other customers on the same server, it makes perfect sense.

No-one serious about their business should have sites on a shared hosting plan anyway. It's fine for small sites, but if the sites actually generate any income ($100/day+) then you really should be on a VPS or dedi.

You are on a "shared" hosting package. Upgrade if you want the bandwidth.

If your sites are using too much of the servers resources then Hostgator did the right thing by shutting you down. Why should all of the other customers get hit with a performance drop so that you can get more than your fair share of the servers resources?

Like others have indicated, maybe it's time to move beyond a $10/month shared hosting account.

I've always had a good relationship with HostGator...so I would agree with our fellow posters that it might be time for you to make the upgrade.

It pays to spread out your sites over a number of hosting accounts and providers.
For a high demand site I'd go for a managed VPS plan until the time comes when you need a dedicated server.


Andrew

George,

I can imagine your outlook would be a little different if you were on the same server and someone else sharing that server with you overloaded it and took everyone's sites (including yours) offline. You wouldn't be too happy would you?

The reason Hostgator do this is because they DO care about their customers. They are not going to let one person take down a whole server and ruin it for everyone else who has been playing by the rules. Giving a few hours warning is also not really an option because by then it could be too late.

On most occasions it's the offending webmasters fault for trying to run a resource draining website on some cheap shared hosting. If you are making hundreds of dollars a day from those sites then invest a couple hundred per month in your own dedicated server... I guess you know that now.

One word of advice when it comes to shared web hosting. Unlimited does NOT mean unlimited. It means *Unlimited (Conditions apply. Consult your doctor if pain persists. Yada yada yada.)

I'll never understand the fascination that the IM world has with Host Gator. I tried them for about three days and that was enough. I couldn't believe anyone would want to put themselves through that. We push many, many, many gigs a day through Dreamhost with no problems at all PLUS they have the best control panel in the business.

Does Hostgator have these dedicated servers, and how much are they? If you get one, should you move all your sites to it, or just the one getting all the traffic?

Would a Hostgator reseller account work if you get a lot of traffic? I don't have this problem (I wish!), but I was just curious. Is it just shared hosting or dedicated server? Or is there an in-between option?

I believe upgrading to a better plan might help when dealing with large traffic, but still, they should have send a warning of some kind.

I use HostMonster and they seem like a pretty good hosting company. Cant knock their 24 hour live support thats for sure.

If you're having problems moving you stuff around, I've had nothing but excellent customer service with the online chat service that HostGator has. They might even be able to just do it for you if you are moving to a dedicated server using HostGator.

Good luck!

when will people learn - despite marketing there is NO SUCH THING as an UNLIMITED hard drive....so how can they offer unlimited space?

and if they could for 2 bucks -- wouldn't youtube and facebook use them?

buy your own servers...

Since you are making good profits from your site, you should upgrade your plan. Your business deserves best and for your costumers too.

So whats the best option??? please share

I'd like to give a heads up for Doreo here. Got a site that gets a ton of traffic (~150,000-200,000 pageviews per month) serving up a whole load of content and I've never had any issues. I've started using CloudFlare too recently which is speeding up server load times.

Hi George,

Nice to see a fellow Singaporean here

Would like to highlight some point of views as I have been running hosting with a decent years of experience. Customers would need to understand that shared hosting is simply a hosting in shared environment; in another word, sharing the server resources with several other users in a dedicated server. Simply put, it likes getting a pie of the cake

Majority of our customers are running autoblog system, and only a small amount of them cause issues to it, depending on how they configure their autoblog system. On the other hand, you will find customers trying to load tons of plugins into their wordpress, thinking that the system resources (CPU/Ram) are infinite. Occassionally, you will find customers loading 100 websites into 1 account; each website uses a small system resource add up to big system resource usage.

Simply put, we are looking into how much each account uses in terms of CPU/Ram, and other factor such as disk IO. If your account has exceed more than its fair share of system resources, definitely suspension needs to be executed on your account or else there will be hundreds of unhappy customers. If your neighbour is causing your site to crash, how would you feel in this case? Of course, advanced notice is appreciated so that the host can work out with you to possibly reduce your usage, however, at that point of time, its not possible to do that as your account is causing an issue now, so not possible to wait for several hours for you to work it out.

If you are earning several thousands per month, have you thought about moving to VPS? This way you are gaining a higher system resources than a shared hosting. If VPS doesn't suit your requirements, moving to a Dedicated Server is the way to go.

If you need any advice, just shoot me a PM, and I will be glad to assist you

Ronald

That is really messed up. I have not had problems with them but my sites are not in the mega traffic range either.

You get what you pay for.

$10/month hosting plan does not work with sites that get large volumes of traffic.

Heck, try getting a VPS at least if you are generating that much revenue per day. For $40-$80/month you are getting a box that can handle way more traffic.

To Will and the other hosting guru posts in this thread, thanks for all the advice!

You should try Yahoo Webhosting. They offer unlimited bandwidth.

I pay hostgator $34.95 per month as a reseller account and I've had the same issues with some sites. whenever they get any sort of traffic, They will shut them down at will because they say a site will be causing undue server overload. Yet another site of mine with another host (wordpress, like the HG sites are) gets 10,000 uniques per month and I've never had a problem.

Once you have enough sites with a host, its a real pain to switch so I'm just dealing with it. I don't know why HG gets such rave reviews though. Gotta love the $100 affiliate payout though. that makes all the pain worth it I guess.

i dont know for sure what service pack you had with them but i pushed over 20 thousand in 48 hours no prob with my package squeaky clean

I think it's about time all these hosting companies stopped advertising their shared hosting accounts as "Unlimited". Sure, a lot of us know there's no such thing as a free lunch, but there's a lot of people out there that assume unlimited really does mean unlimited.

BTW, I've had one of my Hostgator shared accounts temporarily suspended for exceeding the CPU threshold. It took a while to track down the root cause, but turned out it was a WP site that received a large amount of articles from a blog network (had over 18K posts) and whenever the search engines went to index it, it would chew up a lot of resources.

Interestingly, I also have Bluehost accounts and Bluehost have a proprietary system that temporarily isolates accounts that are consuming a lot of resources and allows them to still operate but at a reduced capacity (which is much better than none at all)

I like that hostgator allows you to be 15 days late but they have been having some server issues that shut my site down for a little but, contacted them and they said they were working on it.

Based on my personal expiriance, hostgator is really great hosting company. I really like their 24h/day livechat support However, I never had a authority site with high loads of traffic. Maybe you should go for dedicated server?

Ask them on livechat, they are always helpfull and professional

I had this issue once with them, it definitely sucks. You should upgrade to a dedi.

You might not need to spend a lot of dough on dedicated hosting. You could just need cloud hosting. Its cheaper and is a step up from shared hosting. I have a site that uses cloud hosting and I average around 50k unique visitors a month and works just fine. For cloud hosting you still dont get a dedicated server, but you get dedicated resources.

Its hard to just throw out there that you need this hosting or that hosting, it depends on what your hosting. Are they static webpages or are there a lot of database queries and so on.

Here is the problem on high traffic sites you will run into with Hostgator...

They allow 25 processes per cpanel account. Again... per cpanel account.

So if you have multiple sites on the same cpanel they all share the max 25 processes.

If you are on a reseller plan... the best thing to do is make a new account for each site. This will give you 25 processes per cpanel that are all dedicated to that one site.

That will allow you to live longer on you shared account.

25 processes can be simultaneous page loads, database queries, etc...

So if you are sending page traffic to the site and you have more than 1 site on that cpanel account... think about moving your accounts around on a reseller account to their own cpanel.

So, I'm going to play "stupid" here. Is having a dedicated IP the same as being on a dedicated server?

For example, at bluehost they say:

"What is a Dedicated IP Address?

An IP address is a number like 234.123.66.7 that identifies the unique server where your website can be found. In shared hosting, you share the same IP address as other web sites on your server. By upgrading to a Dedicated IP address, you can enable your site for e-commerce and other advanced capabilities, and minimize the risk of being impacted by other sites on your shared server."


If this is the same thing, it's cheap. It only adds a few dollars each month!

:-Don

I've never had trouble with Hostgator - tried out plenty of others and always went back to HG. At one time, I had a managed VPS and it just kept getting more and more expensive, with the host telling me I needed more services which, of course, cost more money. It was cheaper to get 3 or 4 reseller accounts and spread the load out. If I have problems with one, all my sites don't go down. Right now, I have two different accounts with Hostgator.

Hostgator is about the best around for small shared hosting. However, when your business starts becoming a real business you need to move up. Going to one of their dedicated server options is a solid step up. Putting your bandwidth intensive material on Amazon S3 helps balance the experience and improve performance.

The next step is going to a real premium provider like Rackspace (fantastic, but $$$), or colocation where you have a staff to manage your own boxes located in a solid facility like calpop.

One other thing that helps for bandwidth intensive applications is to use a content deliver network (CDN) like Akamai. They put their thousands of servers worldwide in front of your site like a giant cache. When I last used them, they had something like 15K servers in front of our site. Reduced the load wonderfully, but cost about 5K a month. The costs vary according to how much your users are actually demanding.

It would be fantastic if bandwidth, electricity, air conditioning, servers, racks, support people, etc. were all free and companies could really deliver "unlimited" services for less than $10. a month, but that's not the real world.

Sorry to say, but you get what you pay for. Real businesses have some real expenses. On the other hand, it is great that you are getting the usage to need to move up.

I found that HostGator were particularly bad with CMS platforms that had high SQL loading, like WordPress.

WordPress can be a nightmare for many hosts, as many of the plugins and themes that people rush to install can be hugely time-consuming. Add on the fact that WordPress is not great in terms of SQL optimisation and load handling, and you can quickly experience problems once you have 20+ sites with a single HostGator account.

Running 'flat' PHP/HTML sites generally allows a massive increase in load-handling. All our network sites were moved away from SQL-CMS platforms back in 2008 for this reason. This shows it's face even more with Class C hosting. My experience with their C Class hosting was absolutely dire!