WARNING Re: Shared Hosting Plans - Sudden Cancellation no Warning

It's possible that your site was under attack and the host shut it off to prevent their other customers from suffering under the burden of the resources being drained by the attackers. It really doesn't surprise me that the host will shut off your account because of things like that, because when it comes to $6 a month for one customer or the possibility of losing a few hundred for other users, they will drop you without thinking twice about it.

Shared Hosting? Gross... get a real server

That's why I use GoDaddy 4GH Unlimited Hosting. Never had a problem, great customer support, and its FAST!

Sometimes it pays to go wit the big boys...

Unfortunately after competitive increases of plan services lead to "unlimited" everything, hosts have to invent misconduct or other violations to justify kicking out atypical heavy users.
If your running blogs, the processor and mysql loads may have been the issue, rather than bandwidth, is that "21% of resource" reffering to processor loading?

Using the right cache setups on wordpress blogs can significantly reduce the processor load, the W3 Total Cache plugin in particular offloads bandwidth to Amazon AWS S3/Cloud hosting, which can greatly improve the load speed of a site at a minimal service charge.

If its making you money, get off the shared plans boys!

I remember my first day sending paid traffic to my server... only bought $20 of ads and Only about 4 clicks got through because the server died.

And its not just your own traffic you have to worry about. What about your neighbor on the same server? Maybe he's hogging all the resources.

Shared hosting sucks!

Yep, always speak to the staff before going into any contracts with hosting.

You might want to look at this offer. At these prices you can get a decent server with decent bandwidth. http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-...ting-more.html

All shared hosting has this in their terms and conditions. It is a bit misleading really, but if your making money you would be better off looking dedicated hosting or a vps

I have 100 sites on Hostgator and the only problem you will run into is when you add plugins that are resource hogs, such as autoblogging plugins or use chron jobs, which are also server intensive. I use a caching program for my sites, particularly if they are high traffic sites. Never had a problem.

I've found hostgator to be pretty reasonable about this - on the very few occasions where I've had a site that was a resource hog, they have notified me right away and turned the site back on right away once I made the correction.

Can't ask for much more than that, really.

Bandwidth is a finite resource, so, even though hosting companies claim "unlimited" common sense dictates that they have to limit it somewhere. Most people don't use a lot of resources though so they would never get limited and, therefore, never know the difference.

Lee

I don't have very high traffic (in my opinion) I get less that 2000 hits per day to ALL of my sites.

My busiest site is about 600/day but the site in question was a low traffic site. It appears someone attacked it or something I have no idea Im still trying to get to the bottom of it. Apparantly the site got up to 46% CPU

I can't justify the $100+ per month cost for a dedicated server as I am no where near that level am I ? 2000 hits per day ? No cron jobs or autoblogs. Just the same plugins I have been using for about 2 years.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

But, as a result I will likely purchase additional hosting to prevent this from happening again. Perhaps VPS ? Or even just a second shared hosting account - at least until I am big enough to justify a VPS or Dedicated.

As for the cache plugin (my host recommended I do that) what's the difference. My host recommended WP Super cache (already installed on my busiest sites) - is the W3 Total cache any better ? Any difference ?

Thanks

I think the fair usage policy is fair, because you cant have someone paying 15 dollars a month, then putting a 50,000 member forum on it lol

Simple: Do NOT go shared hosting. Especially if you use Wordpress. It can be a big resource hog....and yes i had sites "terminated" too in the past because of this.

Go with a VPS, it's worth it.

Ahh, I see what you're saying...

Get too much traffic or upload massive files and you'll eventually crash a server or something. That's a pretty fair and typical understanding of hosting anyways. My next question would be to ask who's unlimited plan supports the highest threshold without fail?

I know there's a lot of GoDaddy haters out there, but I've got nothing but LOVE for those boys. Their new 4GH cloud based hosting is super fast and I would imagine would be one of the most difficult ones to crash...

Anyone crashed it yet?

Interesting stuff man.

I always assumed that your typical hosting account would ALWAYS have some sort of cap. I'm gonna have to go investigate that now and see what kind of usage I'm pulling.

I'm not getting massive amounts of traffic or anything but definitely multiple 5 figures per month, probably not enough to crash anything, but now I wanna know my limitations.

How do you think Gurus setup their servers when they are about to do a massive launch with millions of people hitting the page in just hours?

Obviously a GREAT problem to have!

ncmedia : Why do you say stay away from Hostgator ? You are the first one to say so

I had an extensive conversation with Hostgator and Bluehost yesterday about this.

It seems that a VPS is not any better than shared when it comes to this problem. VPS has more features but for a sudden surge in traffic the shared is less likely to crash according to the sales guy.

It may sound strange but I asked specifically. The hostgator shared allows you to go to a max 25% CPU usage. VPS allows you 100% usage but that's 100% of a different CPU. The cheapest VPS plan at hostgator is $19.95/month but that only gives you a 0.56Ghz CPU. So, all in all you get more bang for buck (traffic wise) with the shared. It seems wrong but that's how it worked out.

However, bluehost have a unique feature where they "throttle" your site when it goes over the 7% CPU load mark. A much lower load threshold BUT they don't take your site offline under ANY traffic surge circumstances (that's what they said). If your site becomes a huge resource hog they just move the site to another place that's not so fast and then when traffic calms down they put it back to normal. This is a very nice and unique feature to them because a SLOW site is much better than NO site.

So Im not sure which package to go for as a 2nd backup package. I have also thought it a good idea to mirror the sites on both plans enabling me to change DNS redirect should a problem occur. But I have a question for you - whats the easiest way to mirror a site ? Is it possible to automate this process or do I just have to copy the site myself manually each time I update it ?

Still looking for the best Hostgator coupon (ie more than 25%) if anyone knows one. I'm on the fence with hostgator (more threshold) or bluehost (lower threshold but never suspend your site - just temp slow it down)

And as for my 2000 uniques a day - half of it comes from 2 sites that make little money because I can't find a good converting affiliate for it. But hopefully I will solve that soon to have money to put into the server thing.

A couple months ago, I woke up to this same realization with IX Webhosting. I was irate about the "small print" because I didn't remember anything like this when I bought my two-year package. But I was even more furious that they call the package Unlimited Pro !

I'm leaving them because of poor customer service -- nobody there seems to "get" the inconsistency and I'm even thinking of pinging the FTC to see what they think. Furthermore, they misrepresent pricing on their home page (quoting a price and not saying "as low as" -- but you can only get the price by purchasing 3 years at a time).

By the way, thanks for sharing your conversations with Bluehost because I wondered about that VPS/Hosting Resource Protection.

First, you should never rely on an unlimited plan. ALL hosting has limits, no matter what the company tells you. Hostgator can be a little shifty at times, and my past experience has led me to stay away from them. It's all smiles from the outside looking in, but their service only seems subpar once you're actually a customer, at least, in my opinion.

And as far as GoDaddy, don't fall for the bull. They are NOT the only host that offers the 'cloud.' Check around some of the hosting forums, and you will find many alternatives to HostGator and GoDaddy. You need to watch out for companies that knowingly oversell their resources, but be warned that it might cost you a little bit more.

In a dozen years I've used a lot of webhosting companies... a lot.
And I can say that it depends on how they manage things, there are non-oversold shared accounts that perform better than some VPS...

I currently host with more than a dozen companies, never liked having all my eggs on the same basket. It took a lot of hours of research, and months/years of trial and error.

do you have installed plugin that increase Big database ? but they should be send email to you if have any issues, anyway thanks for sharing