Site #1 – The lies begin.

As promised, we begin. Over the next few weeks, I hope to have the reviews laid out on at least 20 of the “top” web hosting providers. There is no specific order in which these reviews happen, and I will not mention the name of the company or any links to sites. The idea is to show you the information and allow you to decide for yourself.

Here is the plans of their shared hosting accounts. You will notice the claims of unlimited pretty much everything. At first glance this appears to be a great deal. Who wouldn’t want to have unlimited websites hosted for $9.95 a month? You wouldn’t ever have to buy another hosting account. As with most people you would order hosting from them. Good price, plenty of resource to host whatever you need……

You must look closer. How many websites do you think they can host on a server? With those amounts of resources given to every $10/month customer getting whatever they need for their sites, you wouldn’t think very many. That thought would be wrong. This particular company can have anywhere from 400 – 900 websites hosted on a single IP address. Upon completing a reverse IP lookup on one of their servers, I found 623 domains hosted on one IP. How can they give 623 people unlimited hard drive space and unlimited bandwidth? To answer that question we must review their terms of service. So lets get a quote of their tos page.

Using a shared account as a backup/storage device is not permitted, with the exception of one cPanel backup of the same account. Please do not take backups of your backups.
Examples of unacceptable material on all Shared and Reseller servers include:

* Topsites
* IRC Scripts/Bots
* Proxy Scripts/Anonymizers
* Pirated Software/Warez
* Image Hosting Scripts (similar to Photobucket or Tinypic)
* AutoSurf/PTC/PTS/PPC sites
* IP Scanners
* Bruteforce Programs/Scripts/Applications
* Mail Bombers/Spam Scripts
* Banner-Ad services (commercial banner ad rotation)
* File Dump/Mirror Scripts (similar to rapidshare)
* Commercial Audio Streaming (more than one or two streams)
* Escrow/Bank Debentures
* High-Yield Interest Programs (HYIP) or Related Sites
* Investment Sites (FOREX, E-Gold Exchange, Second Life/Linden Exchange, Ponzi, MLM/Pyramid Scheme)
* Sale of any controlled substance without prior proof of appropriate permit(s)
* Prime Banks Programs
* Lottery/Gambling Sites
* MUDs/RPGs/PBBGs
* Hateful/Racist/Harassment oriented sites
* Hacker focused sites/archives/programs
* Sites promoting illegal activities
* Forums and/or websites that distribute or link to warez/pirated/illegal content
* Bank Debentures/Bank Debenture Trading Programs
* Fraudulent Sites (Including, but not limited to sites listed at aa419.org & escrow-fraud.com)
* Mailer Pro

Sounds somewhat reasonable, I guess. The way my logic works though; If your going to sell web hosting, why severely limit your customers to a basic PHP or HTML driven site?
If you look closely you are banned from a topsite? If you know what a top site is, its just a ranking website for a specific industry. Say web hosting review sites. So they subscribe to webhosting topsites, but you are banned from running one?
How about the image hosting site? That includes a FAMILY image site. Even if you are not using it to share images, most image hosting scripts allow it, and therefore not allowed on this companies servers.
A banner ad site? Same as before, all web hosts use banner ad services, but they don’t want you to have one. I bet you didn’t link about an affiliate system. They are banner ad services, and you normally host them locally on your web server. Not allowed with this company.

Lets go back to their terms of service.

7a.) Resource Usage

User may not:
1) Use 25% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc.
2) Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
3) Run any type of web spider or indexer (including Google Cash / AdSpy) on shared servers.
4) Run any software that interfaces with an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) network.
5) Run any bit torrent application, tracker, or client. You may link to legal torrents off-site, but may not host or store them on our shared servers.
6) Participate in any file-sharing/peer-to-peer activities
7) Run any gaming servers such as counter-strike, half-life, battlefield1942, etc
Run cron entries with intervals of less than 15 minutes.

Users are strongly recommended to:
9) When using PHP include functions for including a local file, include the local file rather than the URL. Instead of include(“http://yourdomain.com/include.php”) use include(“include.php”)
10) To help reduce usage, do not force html to handle server-side code (like php and shtml).
11) Only use https protocol when necessary; encrypting and decrypting communications is noticeably more CPU-intensive than unencrypted communications.

They are even telling you how to write your php. I guess when your hosting 623 sites on a single IP address, you would have to do that. I mean you can’t have one site use 25% CPU or Memory, and leave the other 622 to share the last 75%.

So that covers the CPU, Memory and Bandwidth, but what about the hard drive space?

The use of more than 250,000 inodes on any shared account may potentially result in a warning first, and if no action is taken future suspension. Accounts found to be exceeding the 100,000 inode limit will automatically be removed from our backup system to avoid over-usage, however databases will still be backed up. Every file (a webpage, image file, email, etc) on your account uses up 1 inode.

So their unlimited web space only means you can put as much as you want as long as you don’t go over 250,000 file limits. This includes every email, folder, file, database. Since we have decided that you can’t use it for any files not directly related to the website, or host images, or videos, then that leaves normal php or html files. So to do the math, if a typical html or php file uses 80kb or 80,000 bytes of hard drive space, and you have 250,000 of them, then you are using 20,000,000,000 bytes of hard drive space, or 20GB. That doesn’t sound like unlimited to me, does it you? Of course, with all the other restriction, you will never reach 20GB, because they will suspend you before you get their. I know this because it happened to me with this very specific host.

Well thanks for reading, and stay tuned for the next host.