Ever get online one day and see that all your web sites are offline with a suspended notice?  It’s becoming a far too common situation.  Why is this happening?  Shared Hosting.  If you’re just getting started with your “internet hustle” you probably have web sites hosted with a company like Host Gator or Dream Host.  These companies usually offer some great hosting package for less than $20.  They give you over 1TB of bandwidth and some huge amount of hard drive space so it looks like a great deal, and it is.  As with anything that looks too good to be true, there is a catch.  The catch is that you will probably never get to the point where you’re using all that bandwidth they offer you.  This is because these are shared hosting plans.  You’re sharing a dedicated server with other customers.  If your web site starts to get a lot of traffic, and begins to use lot of resources, they’ll suspend you.  They warrant this by saying you’re slowing down the server for the other customers.

Even if you’ve never had this happen to you I’m sure you’ve seen it happen to other people.  How many times have you been on Digg and you click on a story only to get a message saying the account is suspended.  This is because Digg sent the web site a huge influx of traffic and the host shut them down.  You’re host will say that it looks like a DDOS attack or that you were using too many resources.

I can understand why hosts do this, but I’m constantly seeing friends and business partners getting their sites suspended.  They had no idea that their host would do that to them and they suffered monetarily because of it.  I see it all the time with Host Gator customers.  I’ve heard of it happening with Dream Host, but not as often.

What is the solution?

If you have a site that’s growing, and making money you should consider switching to a virtual private server, sometimes called semi-dedicated, or even a dedicated server.  You pay more, but you’re not sharing a server with hundreds and hundreds of other customers.  You wont get suspended is your web sites start to get  a lot of traffic.  For virtual private servers you can pay anywhere from $20 to $500 usually (depending on the specs).  With dedicated servers you can pay anywhere from $100 to $1000+.  If you’re just crossing over from shared hosting you’re probably better off going with a virtual private server.  From then on just upgrade as your site grows.

Be careful and do some planning.  Host Gator will suspend your entire account, not just the domain name receiving all the traffic.  This can hurt you monetarily if you’re running a small store and a large blog on the same account.   If your blog gets you suspended you don’t want your store customers seeing a suspended message.