If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you probably know I’m a bit of a HostGator (aff) whore. I love them. Nearly every time I’ve had a problem it has been taken care of really quickly.
Pretty much the only time I had trouble was when Yahoo decided to block all e-mails from the server - so we couldn’t send any e-mails to Yahoo users. HostGator said Yahoo wasn’t even responding to their inquiries, so I sent a bitching e-mail (about 15 f* words) to Yahoo’s abuse contact and within a week or two the server was unblocked. Go figure, either they finally responded to HostGator or they thought I was going to murder their tech support staff (was thinking about it, I had a sniper rifle all ready to go).
Anyway, HostGator has increased their shared plans like 6 fold, and now their higher-end shared plan has the evil “unlimited bandwidth” phrase. Brent Oxley (I think he’s the CEO) wrote a blog post about it, and to my surprise he admitted what was going on, something that pretty much no other web host would do.
So, will HostGator start sucking? I don’t know. I’ve been incredibly happy with them thus far, and don’t plan on leaving anytime soon. But one thing is for sure - if they do start sucking I’ll be out of there in a heartbeat!
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October 20th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
You will more than likely see the “Account Suspended” page when your traffic peaks. It will stay there for about 5 minutes then your site comes back on.
I will occasionally see it when my site triggers the CPU Limit. It sucks, but that’s what you get with the cheap shared plans.
Thats how they get you to go to the higher plans I guess.
October 20th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
true, but the different between HG and the others is with HG you have to hit the limit and stay there for a set period of time before you’re flagged as using too many resources:
“a) Use 25% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds.”
Most host either don’t even mention resource usage, or they are vague, so they get away with suspending you as soon as you use more resources “than they want you to”. For example, dream hosts TOS:
” If your processes are adversely affecting server performance disproportionately DreamHost Web Hosting reserves the right to negotiate additional charges with the Customer and/or the discontinuation of the offending processes.”
Doesn’t even mention how much you have to use, or for how long.
October 22nd, 2007 at 3:32 am
Well I hope they don’t start sucking as it took me too long to settle on them after I left Ava Host because they started sucking.
October 22nd, 2007 at 8:09 am
Same here - my last few hosts were truly something else. They had trouble handling even 10 hits.
October 24th, 2007 at 2:32 am
I can understand the rationale behind this because it’s mainly due to customer ignorance. Most hosting companies will advertise unlimited bandwidth, so if a customer read on Hostgator’s site, “bandwidth will be limited by CPU and memory usage,” where do you think they’ll go? It’s a shame.
It’s similar to what I read about the nutrient biotin and its effects on hair. It’s only effective when ingested, yet everyone thinks (wrongly) that it also helps to apply it topically to your hair as well. So shampoo companies add biotin to their shampoo products, knowing full well it won’t make a damned bit of difference, but doing it anyway because they’ll lose business otherwise. Screwed up world we live in.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:26 am
Yeah, stupid customers