12.27.07

5 quick ways to get banned from your hosting company

Posted in Hosting at 12:54 pm by PPC Guy

A few friends, co-workers and myself have had their website hosting accounts shut down or threatened to get shut down. Here are a few tips to avoid this from happening. Make sure you don’t set off any of the following flags.

  1. Attempt to send 10,000+ emails

    Weather in a batch operation or in a single email, hosting companies monitor SMTP ports closely. Sending too many emails is the quickest way to get banned from your hosting company.

  2. Hosting any of the following types of sites
    • Adult Content Sites - Any pornographic material, links to adult sites, or advertisements for adult sites.

    • Pirated Software Sites (Warez) - Any software that is copyrighted and not freely available for distribution without cost; i.e. ROMs, ROM Emulators and MPEG Layer 3 files (MP3).

    • Hacking/Phreaking - Includes sites with material, links, or resources for hacking, phreaking, viruses, or any type of site that promotes or participates in willful harm to Internet sites or providers.

    • Copyright Violations - Violation of copyrights held by individuals and corporations or other entities can result in civil and criminal liability for the infringer.

  3. Hosting too many images
    Many hosting companies that provide large storage capacity don’t allow you to simply use your site as an online storage bin. They usually restrict the number of images, audio, content, and video files you have on your site. One give away to your hosting company is too many incoming requests for images, video, or audio from remote sites. It’s very easy to accidently do this. Have you ever put an absolute image link on a popular forum?

  4. Using too much bandwidth/server resources
    Having huge surges of traffic to your website could adversely effect other websites if your running on a shared hosting environment. One of my co-worker posted a catchy article on Digg and this article made it to the homepage of Digg for only a few minutes: within a few hours he received over 30,000 hits to his blog until he exhausted his monthly allotted bandwidth. His hosting company was pretty upset because the sudden up-tick of traffic caused a couple hundred other shared websites to go offline as well. After the fact the hosting company attempted to charge him over $300 for the extra bandwidth. As you can imagine he decided to switch hosting companies soon after.

    In another instance, one of my sites was temporarily shutdown because a PHP script tied up over 25% of the server’s processor. I received a warning email that my account would be terminated if this occurred again. Apparently hosting companies get upset anytime you use too many system resources.

  5. Compromising security

    Any attempt to circumvent user authentication or security is frowned upon. This includes logging into any server or account that you don’t expressly have authorized to access.