You Can be penalized for high traffic to your websites?
Be Warned: Your account can be suspended!
Today I finally realized that ALL the hosting companies are LYING to us! ( ok, that may be a bit harsh - “Misleading” ) With their hosting packages when my account was suspended. You may have seen it just a few hours ago before I got it back up.

You have seen reputable hosting companies offering competitive hosting packages with huge diskspace and bandwith with their packages, some even offer unlimited diskspace and bandwith.

Hostgator webhosting offers huge bandwith and storage for a small price

Yahoo web hosting offers Unlimited Storage & Unlimited Data Transfer - Bandwith
But I can tell you now that they are all misleading, they are just a marketing strategy to get you to buy their hosting . As they know that you may never used up these much bandwith and diskspace. If you have traffic, it is not only the bandwith that will be used up, but server resources which hosts did not declare their limits clearly.
That’s what I thought so myself, and true enough I did not use up my bandwith and storage and yet I was forced to upgrade my hosting plan to dedicated server costing more than $100 - $200 month!
The real measurement for any server is the CPU usage, Memory and SQL, and not the bandwith! You can have 6000 visitors a day and you still wont use up the bandwith/data transfer provided. BUT it will surely use up server resources.
Here’s a snap shot of my website with only
- 6,432 unique visits a day,
- 22,515 pages viewed a day,
- 179,472 hits a day.

6500 visitors a day will only take up a total of 165.51 GB of bandwith a MONTH which is well below the limit of 500GB a month. One would think, such a hosting package will still be capable of handling a few of such sites. BUT no…. no no no… how wrong was I.

My host Acenet offers 500GB transfer (allows for millions of visitors)
My host reported that I am using more than 30% of their resources! Their CPU, Memory and SQL! I was requested to reduce the resources, upgrade to dedicated server or virtual dedicated server or will be forced to suspend my account.
I was very surprised to hear that! I never thought of this before? When we purchase hosting, we only look for diskspace and bandwith. With 500GB bandwith provided, the server should at least handle at least 19,700 unique visitors a day not to mention the advertised “millions of visitors”
The most surprising thing, is that My website is a normal wordpress blog! Do wordpress blogs take up more resources than standard websites?
Anyway, the point is, hosting companies never declare the resources limit they imposed on you on their salespage but yet all hosting companies I contacted above admitted that they will limit the use of their server resources and tried to sell their dedicated server for websites with such traffic when I specifically ask if there is any limits of server resources.
In which case, there is really no point in comparing bandwith as a measure for supporting your website traffic when the hosting companies actually measure your resource usages ( which are never declared and cannot be compared ) The amount and limit of usage will all be in the discretionary of the host.
So I had no choice but to pay for virtual dedicated server and stay with my current host for convenience sake and that they have provided good support previously.
The moral of the story - dont think hosting is cheap and that you will always pay only $10 a month for your hosting. Once your site grow, you have to be prepared to pay more than $100.
There is no point in arguing with your host that you are well under the limits of your bandwith and that you based your purchase on the package as stated. You will be forced to upgrade or suspension of your account
So hopefully, your website income can cover the cost of monthly hosting when your website traffic grows exponentially.