Yesterday i sent a broadcast email for my customer and all of the customer who received the email subscribed to my newsletter. A few minutes later when im trying to access my website i notice that it is suspended. I checke my invoice and there are still few weeks left on my hosting account. So there are no issues about me not paying. To my horror when i checked my email i receive this from hostgator: I dont understand why this happen. I just sent my routine email broadcast to my customer and bam! it hit me straight in the face. For your information the emails are sent to all my customer who subscribed, so there should be no issue about me spamming. I dont understand why they ask me to upgrade to dedicated server because i hardly/never exceed or reach the bandwith or space given. I spent a lot of money and time towards my online business and this is what i get. There are lot of customer's info and contact number in my website plus the orders that im yet to fulfill. Im worried that this will tremendously effect my business. Plesase take note that im writing this not to spread hatred towards hostgator, infact i love hostgator, it's the first hosting i ever used and never thought about switching to others, but this incident really disappoint me. I would like to ask you guys what are the best thing to do right now. Im thinking about switching host but i never done it and i have no idea how to do it. What are the other hosting solution similar to hostgator (baby plan) that i can use. I have several website hosted on the same hosting, how do i transfer it to other host without losing all the data on the website? p.s. sorry for my poor english.
Ask the hosting company if you can send your newsletter prior to do it I'm not a fan of hostgator but can you imagine the spamming issues they would face if they did not do anything with bulk emailing ?
A lot of companies have recently updated their TOS about sending broadcast messages. My solution I would imagine.. get some people together that have the same needs.. and get 2-3 ppl to invest in a good server
If i get suspended will i still get all my stuff in that hosting? I already send the email about this but they are yet to reply.
This is my first time and im wasnt aware of the new TOS. If somebody from hostgator read this please reconsider. I promised this wont happen again.
Like i said.. a good solution is for some guys to get together and hire a server.. unless you can afford a dedi by yourself... solves all your issues
What are other quality hosting that i can use? Can somebody please recommend me. Do they do host transfer for me?
Thanks dutchezz for you advice but i can't afford a private server even if im sharing it with 2-3 people. My country's currency is not as strong as USD so it will be more difficult for me to own a private server.
All I can say is Hostgator is horrible and I mean horrible. My sites would go down all the time and they could never give me reasons why it kept going down and at times, it would take them hours to get it back up? Almost every time I called, they couldn't answer my questions and they told me I had to submit a ticket to get my question answered, thats just ridiculous! I had enough and switched to Rackspace and boy let me tell you, it was like night and day. Their system alerts itself when the site goes down and I have yet to have my site go down for more than 2 minutes. When I call, I can actually speak to someone and they can answer my questions. Rackspace is definitely on the expensive side, but when you run an Internet Business, you can't afford to have your site go down! I am sure some people have had good experiences with hostgator but I am not one of them.
They suspended your account most likely due to the email volume you sent out. If you send more than 200/hour it sets off an alert. Every shared hosting company has a policy like this, and your are supposed to ask them what the limit is. Sending mass amounts of email (even if they are people who opt'd in), puts a large strain on an already busy server (as most shared hosting servers has anywhere from 50-200 other accounts on it with people doing the same thing you're doing). Firstly I would recommend calling them. They have a 24/7 customer support number. They also have a network engineer available through email (support@hostgator.com). Secondly, the email software you are using should (hopefully) have an hourly limit of how much it can send. Set this to 150ish and you'll be fine. Otherwise consider using an email service provider like AWeber.com (costs about $11/month if you pay for a full year) and you'll never have this problem again.
I work in web hosting and email broadcasting has caused such headaches that I would have done the same thing right away. I remember having had a server down a whole afternoon because a customer wouldn't stop sending emails and he was using various techniques to circumvent the policy. It doesn't have to be V|4GR4 spam to be blacklisted. People mark as "spam" all newsletters they don't intend to read. Having your whole server on the black list is horrible, lots of complaints from customers, some leave. It has absolutely nothing to do with disk space or bandwidth. It has to do with CPU and RAM usage. The server gets crazy having to deliver a thousand emails all of the sudden. If 30% are to be delivered to Gmail, the Gmail server blacklists the server, receiving suddenly 300 messages sent from this IP. And while you sent all these messages, the other services on the server are either slow or unaccessible (many people can't use email or access the web pages of the server). This is the problem of shared servers. So you have to design a system that you run each 5 minutes from a cron job and that sends 15 messages at most. You'll be underneath the 200 messages per hour limit and you won't cripple the server.
I wasnt aware of this problem before. How do i correct everything. Does anyone have a similar problem before please let me know what to do.
I also wasnt aware of that. I hope, i just hope hostgator wont ban me for something i didnt intend to do. If i know it will give a big problem for hostgator im surely wont do it, ever.
I use hostgator after reading a lot of positive review here in dp. Im sure my problem are isolated compare to all the good things hostgator offer to the public. 1.3.2008 ill be my full year using hostgator (full year since i started an online business) and im beginning to build momentum. Things like this really make me sad
Most shared hosters are quite bad at this and Hostgator is notorious for it (it has a lot of fans here it seems, but that is probably because they are affiliates and have something to gain by promoting them); you get a lot of space + bandwidth for next to nothing and you never cross the amount but still you get banned. I know there are many reasons for it, but it makes shared hosting a horrible experience. If you tell me what you need, I can make you an offer if you want; I have a bunch of servers that are not doing much currently.