i heard that many shared hosting companies suspending accounts for excessive use of resources. what constitutes excessive use of resources? i heard that you should be careful once you reach 10gb bandwidth limit? is it true?
I believe hosting companies are more concerned with execessive CPU usage e.g. lots of (inefficient) database queries or you have a badly programmed script. High cpu usage usually causes the server to hang and other webmasters on the same server will start complaining.
I've had that very problem, even though all my scripts were 'nice'. I had my account suspended a number of times because of it. Since converting all my scripts to PHP (much faster), I've not had any problems. I have no idea what the threshold for 'excessive resources' is though, and it probably varies between providers. They probably only look when there's a problem, and if you're at the top of 'top', then they blame you for it. Cryo.
You have to read all the fine print in the TOS. The "better" the deal the harder you need to read. Almost all of them specify some limit on resource usage. Look for the one who offers the most liberal plan possible. If you run a lot of scripts and have good traffic you may encounter problems with all bargain "shared hosting" accounts. Everyone likes to sell this large plans because no one really use the resouces. Most people greatly over-buy.
Many years ago I had my forum suddenly turned off because it was taking up too much resources. After that I moved up to a dedicated server.
It was strange, I just had some RSS news updates running and they would update every 12 hours. Hostgator could never tell me exactly what it was that was using up the resources, I think they have had this problem with many accounts. Maybe it was a configuration problem on their side because I have never had any prolems in the past 4 months with site5.
LOL, I am with site5 and having same problem non-stop They gave me final warning about my gallery script eating up CPU, now I changed the gallery script and things seems to be okay between us. Now since I am not using their CPUs that much I am thinking of moving my site to dreamhost (already have multi-domain-hosting account with them) Update: I must mention Site5 people are very courtesious and will always inform you when they disable your web access (they have nice way of giving you option to enable it yourself and bring your site online).
Had the problem with hostgator, running xena and made google maps at the same time. My account was banned, but reinstated when they understood that I didnt know what i was doing. Wouldnt use hostgator for heavy scripts though.