First harsh experience with web hosts - Grr...

I received a call this afternoon from a client (and good friend) and he informed me that he was having a little problem with his e-commerce store.

I type in his URL and hit enter. The page loads with the following: "Your account has been suspended". WHAT?! Why is this account suddenly suspended I think to myself, looking for an email of notice of anything that I might have missed (but found none).

After calling the host's toll free support line and put on hold for a good 20 mins, I decide to use their contact form instead. The response was quick enough, with the reason being that the site has exceeded the account's system resource limit.

What really got me burning was the fact that they made no effort whatsoever to notify us of the situation before suspending the account.

On top of that, it's the high season for his niche (paintball) with a very active and loyal forum community.

I'm finally getting things sorted out after a few emails, and decided to get a VPS. Hopefully it will be enough to keep things running for a while.

...and I always thought that getting the most traffic possible was a good thing

Anyone else would like to share their first bad hosting experience?

 

I had the same thing happen, Had the suspended page and found out I was using too many resources. No warning, no nothing. I sent them an email to put me on a VPS or any other plan they had or to move my account, but just get the site back up and bill me anything I might owe. The site was put back up with no change to my monthly payments. I have not had trouble since. Odd thing is that 3 month before that I hit slashdot front page and my site managed to stay up through it all and the month in which I was shut I had only 1/2 of the traffic from the slashdot month.

 

I don't understand how hosting companies work but they don't want the customers' websites they host ever to grow which is odd. My new host offers me unlimited everything but I'm hosted by a good friend of my sister lol

 

Aren't those unlimited GB hard drives expensive?

 

let's be reasonable here, I'm not going to use that much disk space, all I need is lots of bandwidth.

 

Yeah I got hit last week. My own fault for having a site hosted with 1 & loser 1, it was one of my first sites and has been earning around 5 dollars a day for the last year or so. Got an email off an advertiser saying the site was down. Called my *professional* 1&1 support *expert* to be told that server was being upgraded.

36 hours later was told .NET had been upgraded from 1.1 to 2.0 and asked if my site was compatible. Fortunately I'd moved it off to another host 12 hours ago, but still bloody annoying.

 

I have faced a similar situations many times, the hosts normally dont send mails about quota exceeded, i recieve mails when my email quote exceeds but never about bandwidth issues. Dont know the reason.