Suspended for High Traffic
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.
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Posted
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Saturday, August 9th, 2008 at 2:04 am under
I run a hosting company and have to say that what you said about all hosting sites lie is not correct. Yes alot of the low cost sites do lie to the customer. For one they hope you don’t use all your space so they can oversell it. example is if you purchase a package with 500mb’s of space and only use say 250mb’s that is 250mb’s of space that they can resell. unlimited bandwith again is untrue. As long as you don’t use to much bandwidth your fine. If they find you are using to much, they will do as yours did to you and ask you to upgrade to either virtual, dedicated or move on. Problem is customers look for the cheapest prices and then get burned. I even have a notice on my main page explaining the above to anyone that visits my company. Most good companies that you can get a server from still limits the bandwidth you can use per month and with that how can you in reality offer unlimited bandwidth to anyone that buy hosting.
August 9th, 2008 at 5:43 amThanks Robert,
My hosting is definitely not cheap compared to hostgator & Yahoo, infact it is twice the price @ $14.75 a month for the most basic package they offer.
I received high recommendations for their support and they do provide good support for the past 1,5 years I am with them.
My only problem is that I still could not figure out why a basic (updated TWO basic) wordpress sites can take up so much resources ( i.e CPU, Memory , SQL ) when these sites are well within the limits of bandwith.
This is simply a warning to internet marketers of the term hosting companies are using “Excessive Resource Usage” that may occur to them.
Or it could well be true that WordPress 2.5.1 is taking up the resources which hopefully someone can confirm this.
Here is the reading of excessive resource usage of the first site with 6000+ uniques a day on wordpress blog
[ CPU ] [ MEM ] [ MySQL ]
10.17% 9.64% 0.2
Top Process %CPU 40.0 [php]
[ CPU ] [ MEM ] [ MySQL ]
11.05% 9.54% 0.2
Top Process %CPU 65.0 [php]
[ CPU ] [ MEM ] [ MySQL ]
15.83% 12.38% 0.2
Top Process %CPU 43.0 [php]
Here is the reading of excessive resource usage for the second site with 4000+ uniques a day on wordpress blog
[ DATE ] [ CPU ] [ MEM ] [ MySQL ]
2008-08-09 12.78% 1.83% 1.10
2008-08-08 12.81% 2.62% 1.30
2008-08-07 14.98% 3.39% 1.30
2008-08-06 12.81% 3.71% 1.80
2008-08-05 13.83% 4.29% 1.00
2008-08-04 21.67% 2.83% 1.20
2008-08-03 17.28% 3.48% 1.50
2008-08-02 15.59% 3.13% 1.00
Since you have a hosting company, can you share with us what is your view on these readings?
August 11th, 2008 at 11:55 pmThis has just happened to me.
The figures actually mean nothing to me:
Average %CPU usage – 0.1
Average %Memory usage -4.9
Average %MySQL usage – 0.1
Top Process %CPU 2.7
Now on to the strange part. I’d made the site on a subdomain just to see how wordpress worked. I never advertised it, and it never got any visitors. I had a handful of blog posts on there (approx 10) and a few photos (approx 25). Therefore I think it’s wordpress itself – or one of it’s plugins. I had a few but only the basic ones most people have. I decided to uninstall wordpress and that fixed the problem.
March 10th, 2009 at 12:38 pmHi Dan,
Which wordpress version did you use and which plugins? So that we can pin point this strange problem.
I also have a site with a simple wordpress install, minimum plugins with 5000 unique visitors a day which was flagged with using too much resources again by my host hence now has been moved to a dedicated server.
My situation does not give me the option to remove wordpress since all my contents are in wordpress
March 10th, 2009 at 4:21 pmThe version of WordPress was the latest 2.7
I had the wordpress automatic upgrade plugin installed so was easy to keep it up to date.
Other Plugins were:
askimet
WordPress.com Stats (skeltoac)
All In One seo pack
NextGEN Gallery (note I had zero traffic)
Sociable (for adding bookmarking sites)
My Page Order
Wp_polls (never had one vote because no traffic)
wp-forecast (weather)
Now I write them down, it was quite a few, but the fact is I had ZERO traffic. I had a few spiders but nothing else.
I have been searching google re this problem and some people have mentioned that since widgets were included the problem has occured. I’ve no idea personally, but I do know that it’s WordPress itself and nothing to do with traffic. I just did the site as an experiment – something to play at, so I’m lucky that I was able to delete with no losses. I run a html site also that has tons of graphics on it and a decent number of visitors – no problem with that site ever.
March 11th, 2009 at 10:32 amHi Dan,
thanks for your explanation.
html pages do not use MySQL so it definitely wont take up the resource as shown by the resource readings.
Average %MySQL usage – 0.1
WordPress is widely used but not many people has reported this problem.
The real problem is that web hosting customers like us will never realize that there is such hosting issue as it has never been explained in any advertised hosting package.
The only features people compare when purchasing hosting are:
1. disk space
2. bandwith
3. no. of domains allowed
4. price
5. uptime
but never a mention of:
March 11th, 2009 at 11:05 amAverage %CPU usage – 0.1
Average %Memory usage -4.9
Average %MySQL usage – 0.1
Top Process %CPU 2.7
So true. It like advertising the mansion you will live in but omitting the fact that you will actually be living in a small wardrobe inside the mansion…
March 11th, 2009 at 12:39 pm