I've been a hostgator user for awhile now. I have their resellers package but lately HG has been disabling my website (403 error) and sending me an email stating why. This has happened two days in a row for two different reasons. I am a wordpress user and my site is doing okay with traffic. It is paying for itself but I am not banking any profit from it. I run ads, adsense and get income for paid review. My traffic is under 5000 daily. Maybe under 3000. Yesterday they shut off my site because of permissions on the index file needed fixed. Last night/today they shut off my site because of a server overload. This happened once before so I added wp-super-cache plugin. Now they are saying my max-banner plugin is causing an over load. Max banner is how I make the little income that I get... I can't shut that off. Now I feel like they are pushing VPS down my throats. Yet it's $70 more per month!!! I can't afford that. I feel like they are cutting me off to persuade me to buy the VPS level 4 or 5. My traffic has not spiked or went up. It's staying right around the same as before (according to google analytic) -- so it's odd that suddenly they are shutting me down. I don't host videos or music. I just have text and images on wordpress software. Is HostGator getting greedy? I feel like they are. P.S. there VPS doesn't even come with a cPanel. They charge an extra $10/month for cPanel. Ugh! Also note: VPS is a new thing they just launched recently. I wonder if they are hitting other customers up and telling them they need to upgrade too, if not they will shut you down.? Is it time to shop for a different hosting service? They are my second hosting service since I stared out online.
I really do not see anything unreasonable in what they have suggested. They are on the low end of the spectrum in terms of pricing as it is. I think you'd be hard pressed to find better for less.
Really? I would think with their reseller's package (50gb disk space and 500gb bandwidth) it should be able to handle 3000 visitors per day. I could understand if I was getting 25,000+ per day, but under 3000?
My suggestion move to wpwebhost i ave account there i have blog with more than 4k Pageviews a day and no problem with them they are wordpress specialist
Get a VPS but from a different host. $70 is actually budget dedicated server pricing. VPS are available from $5-$50 per month. You could easily get a decent VPS for around $35-40 per month. Check out the vps offers section at webhostingtalk.com.
But doesn't Hostgator offer UNLIMITED storage and UNLIMITED bandwidth for $6.95 a month? Doesn't this cover high volume traffic?
Any time some one advertises 'UNLIMITED,' it's pure crap, when it comes to being the truth on what they'll allow when it comes to space/bandwidth.
Keep in mind there are differences in the marketing phrases, unmetered and unlimited. Both are generally in a "shared" environment. Unmetered is essentially, unmeasured. Though some hosts offering unmetered do have an initial limit listed in their TOS (small print). So once that limit is reached you can choose to upgrade to a higher unmetered level. In other words you are not being charged for consumption, but rather a limited amount of it in different tiers. Unlimited is generally accepted as a semantics version of the vernacular that assumes that there is something in the way of an "average" web site and "average" consumption (all of which we know to be untrue). That said, unlimited is nothing more than a marketing buzz word or altering of the true "unmetered" or unmeasured rather, form of bandwidth usage. I think everyone knows there is no such thing as "unlimited" in terms of both the amount of and consumption of bandwidth in reality. Anyway, unlimited is a really poor way of describing bandwidth in any form since the reality is that the host will always have limits even on the "unlimited" plans. These limits are not unlike that of the unmetered version which again, is not measuring your consumption. Its just giving you a limited portion of consumption that you can choose to exceed, assuming you want to pay more to exceed it.
UNLIMITED is used a for marketing the hosting most off the time but in ture hosting world thier is no such think as UNLIMITED
The question isn't bandwidth. It's server overload. How much is considered server overload? I don't know because Hostgator doesn't even publish any information about server overload. I asked in chat and the agent said I get only 25% of the cpu. What is the CPU? I don't know because Hostgator doesn't say how much CPU resellers get. Maybe they can make up numbers as they see fit to force webmasters to upgrade?
That's a large percentage of total CPU resources - even for a reseller. We don't have definitive figures but if a single user consistently, and for long periods of time, used over 5% of a CPU, we'd be having words with them about upgrading. Remember it is SHARED hosting you've been buying and there are 10s, 100s, or 1000s of other users on this server, with equal access, and equal rights to server resources. It can't be fair for one user to use too many resources on a shared system to the detriment of others. It's up to the host to make a value-judgement based on the effect your site has on the overall server performance and how much that affects other users. If you want to "do what you want" (not suggesting you do, but some people think that way) then you need to get your own server or VPS. With a VPS or dedicated server your resources would be yours to do what you want with. At least they have investigated and told you what the problem is (your max-banner plugin) which is more than many hosts would do. It comes down to your choice. Remove it so you stop using so many resources but lose the income it generates, or pay more for a VPS and keep the income. One thing to be careful of, your site's performance may actually DECREASE if you moved over to a VPS. The shared hosting server will probably be a powerful server and if you are maxing it out, or causing issues on it, then when you go to a VPS with much smaller and restricted resources (CPU and RAM) then you may max them out very quickly and site performance may suffer.
This is very disappointing to hear I've only heard good things about Hostgator, maybe it's because of their affiliate program. One question, I realize that unlimited space is bull but how can hostgator offer unlimited websites too is there a limit on that? if so what?