After being neglected for some time umgy.com has a new homestead on a different host. The previous host is not to blame for the neglect – that’s a different story and this is about why we’ve moved.
Over a year ago we (that’s Umgy and me and a few other sites) moved to Host Monster in what was supposed to be a temporary and cheap stop over. I was looking for a more appropriate and affordable hosting package. Life being what it is, mostly busy, we’re still with Host Monster (that’s me and the other sites, not Umgy). Before I digress further, I’ll explain why we’ve moved and are trying a new hosting company.
First reason, with Host Monster being a budget hosting company that has one plan and no room for growth I wasn’t expecting the world. With no way to grow to a VPS, dedicated server or reseller account I knew it wasn’t a long term relationship. The response from my inquiry on such services also indicated they didn’t want me long term if I was needing more. I do admit they offered a lot for the price. Besides the standard features and almost unlmited everything I wanted PHP 5 which wasn’t on all hosts at the time. They also support PostgreSQL and Ruby, both of which I was interested in playing with. The support for telnet access was important to me as well. They do continue to move with the times and are now offering Python in their plan.
The second and major reason is how they meter their accounts. Host Monster has a system that meters/monitors server load/system resources. The general gist of this is that if your website(s) take “too much” system resources they will deactivate your account without warning. Their support will claim this is due to inefficient scripts that are bogging down the whole server. In theory this makes sense and seems fair but where the problem occurs is how much is “too much”.
Consider you are their customer. You have purchased a plan which includes “Unlmited Disk Space” and “Unlimited Gigs of Site Transfer”. I bet you’re expecting you can run basically any website you want? Consdiering that you should be able to max out their OC-48 Backbone 24 hours a day with as many visitors that your site software can handle. Unfortunately, you would be wrong. Granted my example is a tad extreme and most of us wouldn’t expect that much but how much would you expect?
My one business site would not be considered a busy website. With under 10,000 visitors a month it’s not a large site. My business, Umgy and some other very low traffic sites are all I have running. Even so my account has been suspended in the past due to the load. The reason for my suspension had to do with MySQL taking too long on the site logging which was basically a shock to me. I’ve have also come dangerously close to their “too much” load when I first copied over my site and other times when I’ve installed one of their supported applications. That’s not mentioning how risky it is when you’re being indexed by a search engine and have maybe 1 or 2 users on at the same time.
To state which I hope is obvious by now, their “too much” is next to nothing in my opinion. If you plan to host a very small site with them then you’ll be fine. If you’re at the starting stages of your site you’ll be fine. Just be careful as you may soon find yourself growing out of an unlimited host. If you won’t take my word for it, you may, like me, have noticed sites you’ve surfed to that come up with a page that shows one line indicating the account has been suspended. It is very likely a budget hosting company and the site has become too big for them.
In closing, it is my opinion that the best and honest business practice would be to indicate they are a host dedicated to casual and small websites and follow that up with less bandwidth, disk space limits and to mention the system metering.
As a bit of a disclaimer and warning I would like to mention that Host Monster is not the only company that has these limits. So be careful with what host you choose. Do a search for reviews on the company you’re interested in. I basically knew what I was getting into when I joined them but as I said it was supposed to be temporary. Also, for a bit of trivia, the word on the web is that Host Monster is owned by Blue Host.
Any comments or notes about how Umgy is currently running would be very helpful with evaluating the current host.