Has anyone had any problems with them? I am going to seriously flip!! I have about 7 subdomains with them, on a shared hosting server... I had recently put one of my sites up for sale, yesterday. I have very little to no traffic on any site so far.. Well I just got an email from them saying I was suspended for Abuse. This is the email: Hello, We have been forced to suspend the arouse account on the gator225 server. This account was causing loads to exceed 100 almost crashing the server. Can you believe this? I wrote back: Hi there, Ok, well this is pretty disturbing. I just got off the phone with HostGator support and they said that I have to reply to this email, and since you have given me no way to respond I will reply. First of all there is ABSOLUTELY no WAY that I could have crashed the server on my shared hosting account. Why because I have virtually little to NO traffic what so ever going to any of my sites. What perturbs me the most, is that I just put sitename.com up for sale yesterday, and in the middle of my auction the Website is now saying that it has been suspended. This is not good for business whatsoever. I am very dissapointed with HostGator, I dont know what to do here, I am in the middle of a sale. Really there is absolutely no way that my shared hosting account needs any sort of Virtual Dedicated Server. If this is a way of getting me to upgrade, well I will take my business elsewhere. A nice thing to do would have been to explain these errors you have included in your email and/ or tell me how I can respond / resolve this but you just sent me an email and Suspended my Account! I cant believe this. This needs to be resolved NOW, and I need to have my sites up and running again. This is pure stupidness. I rely on your hosting company for my hosting needs, please get back to me ASAP! -Angela Then they replied.. Hi, So what you're saying is you put sitename.com up for auction on eBay, causing high interest in the site, and you're not sure why we're saying your site literally caused the server to almost crash? We don't suspend accounts unless necessary. Your domain caused massive load on the server. We're not trying to force you to upgrade, you're welcome to try using a static page or something else instead of a php page that hits a database for every visitor. Simply put, your site did cause extensive performance problems for the server. We don't suspend accounts unless that is the case. If you'd like to make modifications to the site to avoid that problem, we'll be happy to reinstate service. Thanks. So what do I do?? I have never ever ever had this problem before. Do I sign up and pay for the Dedicated Server?? Im not sure I need one, but this is completely ridiculous!!! Any Advice would be great.
This is the reason I refuse to use the services of such a big hosting company. Your just another number. Perhaps transfer your sites to a reputable smaller company? If you know for a fact you weren't using many server resources, I would try and sort out the issue to get the sites back online, and just transfer outta there.
dcrusto, Thanks for your response and helpful advice. I think your right. I'll see what I can get them to do and let you know what happens.. I HATE THEM
As suggested above, its in your best interest to focus on resolving the matter (i.e. getting your site online) as soon as possible. If you spend time and argument on how your site didn't cause it, you will be loosing mostly both because they haven't (and probably won't) give you any proof. Further they have all the time in world to argue with you. You can do few things quickly, resolve the issue (if there is one) or just buy montly hosting package with other company (shouldn't go beyond 10$) and have main sites moved there immediately (NS changes are painfully slow sometimes). I had similar problems with so many hosts and changed over 5-10 hosts in last year. Its best to conserve your energy and move on
Lol there u go a hater of all those big fat companies (now i need more such folks so my small company can prosper ) . Note: Even a small site you think is harmless can bring server down, i run my hosting i seen a dude almost crashing the server too which gets almost no hits, buy just running unsecure scripts and giving out free invitations to hackers to deface his site and so on.. So, ask hostgator to send you the logs, unless they rebooted the server which would be than impossible if they have logs set to clear after reboot. Cheers
True. Its nothing to do with big or small hosting company. In fact my experience with small companies is even worse. Hosting market is full of BS offers (like unmetered bandwidth etc), your best option is to move on and focus on business.
At least they notified you. I've had hosts before not even notify me and just pull the plug. It's possible something in your script also caused a run away process or something to kill the server, a site does not need alot of traffic in order for this to happen. While it does suck for you, if your site trully was causing an overload on the server imagine the other people hosted there. They should not have to suffer because of someone elses site causing a load.
Yaa grim telling good point there. Plus i would pull the plug for sure (without notification) (most would in extreme cases) if i could not even login to my own server if some site was causing load, and server admin was no where to be found to take care of it, cause for $1.55 i do not think i care much about the customer abusing the server resources for the money they paying me . There are about 60 other customers on server i need to look after too... So , they leave me no other option to do the dirty pull plug on site act, but ofcourse i unsuspend it after issue has been resolved and the admin says what caused the issue, and warn the user with the site that if that happens again its a termination ....
Yes, but how on earth can I prevent an issue like that from happening? I mean the issue was caused by too much traffic... All from putting it up for sale.. How is this my problem?? Shouldnt they be able to handle the traffic load? Im sure it wasnt an ecstatic amount like some big sites. All I did was put the damn thing up for sale which apparently caused the traffic. How is this an abuse issue???
Tell them to produce the log files showing you were the cause of their server crash. It sounds to me like they are idiots.
Traffic does not equate server load in all cases. Server loads are also totally different than bandwidth. Reasons such as this is why I run all my own servers. Watching the admin section of my servers I can see sites and what cpu % they are eating up. A standard emailing list script can bring a server under a high load. This is not caused by traffic, but by the script itself being processed by the cpu, memory etc. If the page was a simple .html page you more than likely would have no problems, it however appears to not have been. Cheap hosting is also just that in most cases, cheap hosting. Hosts could not make any money or offer hosting as cheap as they did if they allowed people to use excessive amounts of memory, cpu, etc.
I've also had this problem with Hostgator a few weeks ago. I had several sites on a Hostgator account - all pure html - no scripts, no php includes, nothing except for pure html. I received an almost identical email to the one AngelaR got. After a bit of emailing Hostgator reinstated the sites - but by then I had already moved them to another host. Hostgator refused to admit they were wrong - but my logs show that there was no extra traffic and the sites in question were incapable of putting high load on a server. I used to sing Hostgator's praises. I don't any more. They're continuing to make the same mistakes and they're refusing to learn from them.
Thanks everyone for your most helpful responses. I really appreciate them Explorer: Which host did you move to if you dont mind me asking? My site the only script it has running is SMF (Forums!) and AssosiateOMatic for Amazon associates store.. This doesnt seem right to me. The pages in question are all html, no php in them at all.
Of course, a bit confused here. Cheap hosting will not get you near the power of a vps or dedicated server, or the ability to run certain types of scripts. When you have 100 clients on one machine, of course the host can not allow the clients to use scripts that cause loads of even a fraction of the cpu. Even 1/4 load x 100 = a 25 cpu load, nothing worse than an over loaded server.
AngelaR, I moved the sites onto a reseller account I already had with asmallorange. I should add that the Hostgator account that ran into trouble was a $10 per month one that made use of ad on domains - maybe just too cheap. I have a $25 per month reseller account with Hostgator that I've had no problems with ........ yet .
If you read the TOS of Hostgator I am sure everything is explained there. And I dont doubt that you used a lot of resoureces on the server if you have heavy database usage for every visitor.
After switching our personal sites and our client sites to Host Gator a few months ago based on several glowing recommendations from associates, we have had nothing but problems. Specifically with e-mail accounts being compromised. Their customer service is always very quick to respond but we've had several situations where they were very rude. Overall, not a very good experience to date.
they suspended my account like the second day i got with them. ha i hate them too. but of course everytime i wrote about it on here people said i was lying, for some lame reason.