Account (website) suspended without warning

[omniuni]

I think you may be confusing the issues. The OP wasn't too specific, but he said he "had backed up my web site and a few other things". He didn't say he was trying to use his WHB account to back up all his computers.

As a web host, they should certainly have and allow web site backups!

I agree though that web hosts shouldn't start allowing shared accounts to back up everything from home too. But then, why would anyone do that when you can get e.g. Mozy ($5 USD/mo) or Jungledisk (maybe less) to do it so much cheaper.

Remember, WHB backs up the accounts themselves. There is no point to storing a back up on the server... if it goes down, so does the backup! (But not WHB's off-server copy is still safe) If you need to back up a certain version or revision, you should have a local copy. WHB is a host, not a version and revision system! If you want functionality like that, perhaps we can ask WHB to consider allowing SVN or something like that. Also, if a website backup is 4 MB, or even 30 or 40 MB, it should not be enough to trigger the admins to suspend the site, but if you're backing up a several gigabyte site to the server several times, it takes up space, time, and resources, and will definitely trigger an investigation.

[obitori]

Chief Ninja Matt:

Thank you for your explanation. If you can implement it, I think it makes sense to provide pre-suspension notification to account holders like myself who have unintentionally violated your user agreement. Where the violation involves warez or other intentional misuse, the notification should not be required. Of course, this requires that you be able to discriminate between accidental errors like mine and intentional violations.

Most of all, I appreciate your taking the time to listen to my concerns and to respond appropriately. Other than this one hiccup--admittedly triggered by my storage of some backup files--I've been impressed with your company's helpfulness and responsiveness.

Regards,

Bud Roth

[Matt R.]

Chief Ninja Matt:

Thank you for your explanation. If you can implement it, I think it makes sense to provide pre-suspension notification to account holders like myself who have unintentionally violated your user agreement. Where the violation involves warez or other intentional misuse, the notification should not be required. Of course, this requires that you be able to discriminate between accidental errors like mine and intentional violations.

Most of all, I appreciate your taking the time to listen to my concerns and to respond appropriately. Other than this one hiccup--admittedly triggered by my storage of some backup files--I've been impressed with your company's helpfulness and responsiveness.

Regards,

Bud Roth

Bud,

You are more than welcome. We always listen to customer opinions and myself and our team constantly strive to provide the best service we can.

This policy has been in place since Monday now, and it is working quite well.

Thank you for your understanding on this.

[Charlotte]

I'm having the same problem - account suspended for ... all sorts of infractions, most of which I have no idea how to correct. The first time was the one about storage of files not linked to webpages. OK, so I was uploading zip files and not bothering to delete them after unzipping. Fixed that.

The next time was something about my site consuming more than it's fair share of server CPU/Processor and Memory resources. And when I looked at the logs, most were ZERO except for one weekend when my family genealogy site (phpgedview) must have had someone spending some time with it. I reduced the number of pages that can be viewed per minute.

And now, again, same thing, but this time it seems to be a googlebot that is causing a script to fail to complete (phpgedview again). So I figured out how to write a robots.txt file.

Is there any help out there for clients who would like to know IN ADVANCE when their accounts are going to be suspended? I look at the log files available in Cpanel, and - since my websites are mostly family-related - there is very little activity. How can I prevent these suspensions???

[Maxim M.]

When an account uses considerable share of server system resources technicians are forced to go ahead and block this account. Rest of the users should not suffer from server high load, should they? The exact restrictions you should follow can be found in our AUP:
http://www.webhostingbuzz.com/?hosti...t-usage-policy

However I should mention again that Disk Usage Provision abusers are now notified and given time to solve the issue.

[Matt R.]

Charlotte,

What's your ticket number? If you ask for advice, our techs are will usually help you out with suggestions on how you can tackle this.

[Dennis A.]

Charlotte,

I've just replied to your ticket. Let me explain what's going on.

There are actually two types of serve audit at WHB, planned audit and on-demand emergency audit. Planned audit is pretty clear, our audit staff merely takes servers one by one and checks user accounts and system resource usage logs for WHB policies compliance. Naturally Audit department representatives notify account owners before account suspension during planned audit. There's no emergency here, and no need to take harsh measures prior to just talking to people.

On-demand audit is the part of emergency response procedure, we start it when server state is suboptimal and we suspect this is due to unfair resource usage of some sort. In most cases we're forced to suspend accounts during on-demand audit as we have to bring the server back to operational state as soon as possible. We simply don't have enough time to notify users and wait for response.

Please accept our apologies for this incident, but, as I see from stats dump in the ticket, your script really was killing the server. Anyhow, I hope this is fixed now. Thank you for your understanding.

[Charlotte]

Thanks for your explanations - it does make sense that you would need to shut down a site that could bring down a shared server. I just wish I had a way of knowing if my websites are misbehaving - some way of monitoring their activity. The awstats don't seem to give me any useful information, and none of the other logs offer much either - none of my websites are terribly active.

Again, thanks for the explanations and the quick responses to my moaning!