Do HM just ban accounts now

[D0gSoldi3r]

Do hostmonster just ban sites now instead of suspending :eek: reading a few posts recently and they have said they have just had their hostmonster accounts banned and not suspended. I was under the impression if your using too much bandwidth or resources that HM would just suspend your account giving you the chance to get rid of whats causing the issues not permantley ban your account giving you no chance to fix the problem. What the hell guys whats going on :confused:

[shadmego]

Section 9.01 of the Terms of Service:


Breach of Terms and Account Termination. The uses of HostMonster.Com Services set forth in this section 9 hereinbelow are prohibited. The engaging in any prohibited use as set forth herein by Subscriber or by any affiliate or subscriber of Subscriber ( as determined in the sole discretion of HostMonster.Com) constitutes a material breach of these Terms and will subject Subscriber's account to immediate termination without notice.

Section 11.05:


Duty to Notify HostMonster.Com of Breach. If Subscriber discovers anyone on the HostMonster.Com system violating any of these Terms or notices anything suspicious from the HostMonster.Com network, Subscriber agrees to report the violation or suspicious activity to abuse@hostmonster.com for investigation. HostMonster.Com reserves the right to and will immediately terminate any account which HostMonster.Com concludes to be in violation of any of these Terms.

I tried to search the Terms of Service page for any words resembling "suspend" but could not find any. I think it's a misunderstanding and/or acts of good faith that Hostmonster will only "suspend" accounts for minor offenses. The Terms do not bind Hostmonster to anything other than account termination. And this is of course, at their sole discretion ...

I hope that helps clear some things up ...

~regards

[D0gSoldi3r]

So if i accidentally overload the cpu quota, my site will just be banned that sucks with no chance of redemption since you never really know what your using and what your boundaries are. So how the hell are we supposed to know what thresholds we're not to cross. I always operated my site on the premise if i went to far with PHP, HostMonster would just suspend my account giving me time scale to fix the issue, but this just sounds unfair. :(


If hostmonster gave us a mechanism, that we could monitor our activity to let us release steam and optimize our traffic when the quota limit was near max there would be alot less people being banned. Even YouTubers have that for crying out loud. :(

[shadmego]

That's true, and I can understand your concern, but keep things in perspective.

The people that are posting their accounts got banned are not really giving any context in which the action took place.

Hostmonster does have mechanisms in place (and others have posted about it) where an account will be automatically suspended for heavy server load; the suspension lifting after the load issue has been resolved.

We also hear a lot about people find other companies that offer several times more resources, but we aren't told if this other company is offering these resources in a shared hosting environment or not. A dedicated server (including VPS) cannot be compared to a shared hosting account at all. They aren't even in the same league.

Aside from that, I might agree that Hostmonster can do more in its Terms of Service to offer remediation of lower level violations. They can also more clearly define what they are looking for in terms of CPU usage, but none of us can complain that Hostmonster acts in accordance with their ToS. We have no excuse. I am not trying to make light of others losing their accounts/domains, but again, put things in perspective.

If one account on a server is taking up 75% of the resources on said box and 799 others notice the lack of resources, Hostmonster gets 799 live chats and tickets saying sites are down or are running REALLY slow ...

They find the culprit and what do they do? Plead with the customer about the resource hogging? The account might either be banned or suspended, but also don't forget that Hostmonster has a process by which customers can argue their case and possibly get their accounts back.

A point of note here .... I would caution anyone fighting fir their accounts to not lose their cool. Being unreasonable and viciously degrading will not help your cause at all. In fact, it may get your IP address blocked from HM sites across the board and you will no longer be able to speak with the abuse department (as a recent post indicated).

Again, I don't make excuses for HM, I just trying to keep things in perspective.

[D0gSoldi3r]

Thanks shadmego, not trying to throw fuel in the fire. I'm aware there are several posts near mine that are complaining about being banned, wasn't creating a thread all those guys could jump on just need to clarify it for myself. I looked at some of the offending sites and noticed the files they were sending was 2 gigs and over and people downloading those files over 2000 times so that would be like 2 TB's downloaded in a short space of time so i've noticed how one of them got kicked off HM. I think by the time i start sharing 2 TB's within 6 months would be the time i would be moving on to a different server. Considering a comedy site like mine sharing 2 TB's seems far away in the future anyway. :)

[rleeden]

I was reading this thread yesterday, when as it happens my site got suspended. :(

I took shamego's advice and kept my cool and my site was back up and running. :)

I did query why it got suspended, assuming the reason was going to be CPU usage. Although, if it had of been I wouldn't have really understood as my site is pretty lightweight. But the problem turned out to be using too many 'web connections' - i.e. too many visitors. OK, I understand that on a server there is a limited amount of web connections it can cope with and on a shared hosting environment if one site takes too many it can cause problems. But it's very difficult for us too measure what too many 'web connections' are when there are no limits imposed. Same with CPU exceeded issues.

As I said my site is back up and running now, after I made some changes - images, Javascript and CSS is now hosted elsewhere so that visitors just download the index page from HostMonster.

Like D0gSoldi3r not trying to throw fuel on the fire, just trying to understand and prevent this from happening again.

[D0gSoldi3r]

Is this you're site http://flagfox.net ??????

[rleeden]

Is this you're site http://flagfox.net ??????

It is - and so is the subdomain http://geotool.flagfox.net, which was the site with the issue.

[oVerRateD]

kind of off topic...

but, i love your plugin.. been using it for a very long time now :)