I just discovered that the Webhosting company with which I maintain a reseller account -used for personal multi-domain projects and web developing- has added a no-Topsites clause to its terms of service and has configured its servers to reject any attempts at installing a Topsite. I find this policy quite unreasonable and a frustrating inconvenience. I would take my business elsewhere, but this company has gained quite a monopoly, and most of its competitors are actually resellers of this companies web space and bandwidth. I would go to a biggy like Godaddy or even that snooty, over priced Network solutions; but they don't have cPanel, and I am spoiled for any other web account customer interface. Does anyone know why a company would ban Topsites? I realise that the Company in question[which blatantly lies about your allotted resource allowance] is interested in maximising its bandwidth so that it can sell accounts to as many customers as possible, -but I had a Topsite before, and it used marginal resources. These greedy corporations are cheesing me off. -C.
Hi, They are just a simple companies who use dedicated servers to make multi accounts and fraud young webmasters, good example is bluehost.com. Just get a dedicated server and you can do what ever you wish, even resell - or find a truthful shared webhosting.
I don't want to give this monster any publicity, but I'll give you a hint. hostcrocodile. Just exchange crocodile for a close Floridian relative. Yes, I am considering renting a dedicated server. -C.
Every web hosting company seems to have benefits and drawbacks. I personally host various businesses on GoDaddy as well as iPowerWeb. GoDaddy has a lot of rules and they do other things like block certain ports which can make using them difficult. IPowerWeb is a little more expensive but they are a good host company. I've been with them for a few years now. I like GoDaddy because you can try different ideas easily on a month-by-month basis and not get too deep in the hole. They charge $3.xx a month for a basic host account vs. ipowerweb which is close to $100 a year. I guess it goes back to the old adage: you get what you pay for. David Beyer
I would find out the exact reason. There is no reason for banning a basic top-list site unless you are using a bad script. The host would have to be looking for very specific footprints so they are probably targeting a particular script. If I were to build a top-list I would just create my own script. If your host is banning these scripts, there must be a good reason for it. Find out the reason because it may even be good enough that you should not be running the script on dedicated servers either. One likely reason for banning certain scripts is that they could be security risks or they may easily be manipulated to send out spam. One example of this is old form mail scripts. I am sure there are much better alternatives today but they were once banned by a lot of hosts because they were being compromised and used for sending out spam. If this were to happen on your own server then your IP would likely get blacklisted so that you could not send out email for any reason.
Nestratics. They absolutely refuse to respond to my inquiries regarding their policy on Topsites. In fact, they moved my thread -which I Posted on their company forum regarding this matter- from the customer review forum to the shared hosting forum, where it will less likely be seen by perspective customers. They sent me three PMs informing me that they had moved the thread, but offered no answers to the question it posed. Pretty sleazy in my estimation. I was using Aardvark Topsite. Is this an undesirable application? Can you suggest another. I don't mind paying for a good, licensed application. Thanks. C.
I don't really know of any toplist applications. A quick Google check shows that Hostgator is banning these sites because they are resource intensive. That means they are using a lot of CPU and RAM. As mentioned in the other posts, you are better off looking for a different host or going with a dedicated solution such as a VPS.
Give that man a cigar!...lol Hostgator has grown too large and greedy. They are restricting my resource allocation in order to sell more hosting accounts. Of course they lie about how much bandwidth or storage is given with your package. If your site becomes moderately successful,- say you have a forum with an average of 50 members online at any given moment - you will soon receive a customer service email demanding that you upgrade to a dedicated server, or, have your account terminated. This, even if you have not used anywhere near the allocated resources they advertise. -C.
I can't really think of many hosts that specifically say we ban top list web sites, I know we don't have that in ours and some of the big boys don't either. Most it's more about the resources your using and I could see a top list causing a lot of strain if it's a big one. Just think of it this way every hit a site on your toplist gets is a hit on your button they have on their site which also does php. So you combine all the traffic of the sites on your list and that can really put a strain on a server far more than probably even a forum with say 200 members active at a time in a 15 minute span.
@InFlow. I can see how some of these high traffic, cross linked pornography related Topsites could be resource intensive. But a topsite with 20 or 30 relatively obscure political sites? I guess we all have to suffer for the abuses of the few. If I find a suitable, trustworthy host -not a re-seller! - I'll jump ship from my present webhosting provider. Their service is generally very good, but I want a topsite. Maybe I'll just buy a secondary account somewhere just for that purpose. It's always something. -C.
Ya C you can get a Dedicated Server for your needs and then you can get along with a hosting company as well and you can promote your server with topsites. Means Rent a Dedicated Server and Then grow your business with more and more kind of topsites.
Well, I can understand where they're coming from on this do I agree with it? no of course not if the top site is small it will not be an issue and that's been our stance on it for a while. Had some small ones not have any issues had one huge one that after a month we gave the customer notice to move. He was serving a million page views a day through it which was absolutely insane for a shared environment. But for a lot of the larger ones hostgator, dreamhost ect. People think they can serve 100,000 unique hits out of the accounts a day. So they add top sites and a lot of other scripts that people on their service anyways try to serve hundreds of thousands of page views through each day. It saves them the trouble of having to suspend all these accounts each day because of resource usage and causing servers to go down as a result.
That would be because these overselling hosts lie about what they offer --- hundreds of Gigs of space and bandwidth for only a few dollars per month. Once you really start using this --- they boot you for whatever reason they can find in the small print.
See here's the problem with hosting you don't need lots of space and bandwidth to cause server strain. With a top site serving 10,000,000 pageviews a day it would only use probably 1-3GB of bandwidth a day if it's lucky. Wouldn't come close to using the bandwidth or space provided. Even a host offering say 40GB of bandwidth a month wouldn't let you serve that 10 million pageviews a day site on their servers.
what if they arent overselling... you may not be using anywhere near your quota but if your accoutns are pulling heavy resource loads on the servers they have the right to suspend/terminate... its probably in the TOS about heavy resource load (cpu/memory) Violations of the Terms of Service will waive the refund policy. 7a.) Resource Usage User may not: a) Use 25% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc. b) Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD. c) Run any type of web spider or indexer (including Google Cash / AdSpy) on shared servers. d) Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network. e) Run any bit torrent application, tracker, or client. Please note that you may link to torrents off server, but may not host or store them. f) Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities g) Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1942, etc h) Run cron entries with intervals of less than 15 minutes however, i am not saying it is right for them to ban a topsite unless they are breaking TOS
I agree... it only takes 1 view from some script gone bad. I don't think the OP was running anything with those kind of numbers your using either. At those levels... yes, a dedi is most likely in order. I think a decent shared host would of worked with him to keep his topsite running... instead of giving him the boot.
RE: overselling Somebody is offering 350,000 MB of diskspace for $5.00 per month. Since there is no such thing as an unlimited harddrive... just how many $5.00 accounts would you put on 1 server before considering it oversold ?
It is common that spammers use topsites to attack web site with hundred thousand request and that way take a lot resources and in worse scenario shut down server completely. Actually it have nothing to do with bandwidth but with CPU resources that script cause because of attack. Non related web sites join for free using automated script (that can even bypass captcha) and then try to query usually button.php using their name to get higher position.