craigbowman
Veteran
Its always nice to actually experience the fine print and have it kick in BEFORE you start to actually believe what the marketing people try to imply.
No matter what the marketing and advertising people want you to think about their claims of unlimited size for shared webhosting, its just not so. Always examine the fine print for their TOS ( Terms of Service ). You know, that endless mountain of legal crud which we routinely click to accept because we don't have days to pour through @ $435/hr. with our lawyer to get an opinion on. Pretty much the TOS will demonstrate that unlimited has a large number of caveats.
I recently ran into an issue with a large service provider that emailed me about exceeding the number of database tables allowed on any one account to 1,000 and I had a total of 1,675. Interestingly enough since I had switched over to a high end content management system which uses a database to look after the content, it quickly became clear that every developer who had built their own custom module, was using a new database table or two to support their module extension to the core system. Very common for a single site installation to quickly get into hundreds of tables in the database, despite the fact that the total amount of data was only a handful of MB.
Digging into things further, they also don't want any single one database to exceed 2GB or total number of files, (including all the emails in every site across all users to exceed 50,000.
Considering the number of scratch sites and other test material floating around my account, getting back into compliance with their TOS was fairly easy. However, having been alerted to the actual limits on things for real, despite all the claims in their advertising about unlimited this that and the other thing, I'll definately be going the route of dedicated servers for any feature movie sites I will be promoting/hosting.
I'm not actually griping about any of this. Just wanted to post to make people aware so they don't get snagged one day out of the blue when they least expect it from their friendly neighborhood hosting service. (Name of provider kept out as detailed research has since shown that all of them have various limitations under their shared hosting plans. This information is also strictly aimed at shared hosting services and doesn't portain to VPS - Virtual Private Servers or Dedicated Server services.)
No matter what the marketing and advertising people want you to think about their claims of unlimited size for shared webhosting, its just not so. Always examine the fine print for their TOS ( Terms of Service ). You know, that endless mountain of legal crud which we routinely click to accept because we don't have days to pour through @ $435/hr. with our lawyer to get an opinion on. Pretty much the TOS will demonstrate that unlimited has a large number of caveats.
I recently ran into an issue with a large service provider that emailed me about exceeding the number of database tables allowed on any one account to 1,000 and I had a total of 1,675. Interestingly enough since I had switched over to a high end content management system which uses a database to look after the content, it quickly became clear that every developer who had built their own custom module, was using a new database table or two to support their module extension to the core system. Very common for a single site installation to quickly get into hundreds of tables in the database, despite the fact that the total amount of data was only a handful of MB.
Digging into things further, they also don't want any single one database to exceed 2GB or total number of files, (including all the emails in every site across all users to exceed 50,000.
Considering the number of scratch sites and other test material floating around my account, getting back into compliance with their TOS was fairly easy. However, having been alerted to the actual limits on things for real, despite all the claims in their advertising about unlimited this that and the other thing, I'll definately be going the route of dedicated servers for any feature movie sites I will be promoting/hosting.
I'm not actually griping about any of this. Just wanted to post to make people aware so they don't get snagged one day out of the blue when they least expect it from their friendly neighborhood hosting service. (Name of provider kept out as detailed research has since shown that all of them have various limitations under their shared hosting plans. This information is also strictly aimed at shared hosting services and doesn't portain to VPS - Virtual Private Servers or Dedicated Server services.)
