For some time now on this site I’ve been warning users about the dangers of unlimited hosting and how such accounts were never truly “unlimited” but rather, are only “unlimited” until an account begins to interfere with the server.

While that limitation is widely understood within the hosting community, it now has a new poster child to serve as a warning for it.

Late last month, Frogpants, a network of popular tech-oriented podcasts, went down after its host, Bluehost, pulled the plug on the account it was on, including some 13 other domains.

Though there was an initial backlash against Bluehost caused by the downtime, much of it pushed out by the site admins themselves as part of a campaign against the company, it ended up having a mixed effect as many openly criticized Frogpants for attempting to host such a large, bandwidth-intense network on an account that was only $7 per month.

Nonetheless, the Frogpants story should have many “unlimited” hosters very worried and questioning if the site they are on is the right one for them.

What Happened

Sometime on July 26th, Frogpants, a popular podcast network which counts The Instance, a top-100 podcast as one of its stable, disappeared from the Web. The network’s host, Bluehost, had disabled access to the account and, in an email to the administrators, giving them 14 days to recover their files.

Frogpants was able to recover fairly quickly and was given new hosting by ZeHosting, which specializes in clustered hosting and has hard bandwidth caps. All in all, the sites were down about a day and recovery was fairly swift.

However, even as they were scrambling to get their sites back online, the administrators at Frogpants were working to spread the word about the closure. Taking to Reddit and Digg, among other social networking sites, as well as posting blog entries and tweeting about the events.

They managed to get Bluehost’s attention, which offered to reactivate the sites to allow for the transfer. However, by the time the offer was made Frogpants was already up and running at their new host.

More importantly though, a warning was sounded about the limitations of “unlimited” hosting and it is a warning that should carry far beyond the customers of Bluehost.

Why it Happened

It’s unclear exactly how much bandwidth Frogpants was pulling down but it seems likely given that it was a network of over a dozen podcasts, many of which were very popular, the answer is quite a bit. Looking at just The Instance, many of the episodes were 100 MB or more, meaning that the bandwidth totals could add up very quickly.

Most likely what happened is that Bluehost noticed congestion on their network, at least in one part, and realized that much of it was caused by the Frogpants account. Then, citing its “Unlimited” usage policy (see item 7), disabled access to the account to protect its network.

It was an unfortunate situation but, from the viewpoint of Bluehost, a necessary move. In order to ensure that dozens, if not hundreds, of accounts have reliable use of the network it had to cut off one account. This also, unfortunately, meant that it could not give any warning to the account holder as the account was, almost certainly, already negatively impacting the network.

In short, Bluehost found itself in a situation where it had to either anger and disconnect one customer or risk angering countless other customers by having their service degrade noticeably. Bluehost made the only choice it could, even though it caused a firestorm.

Why It Could Happen to You

To be clear, the majority of sites that host on “unlimited” accounts will not have similar issues to Frogpants. Though they might be temporarily disabled due to a traffic spike, such as a Digg effect, those cases usually center more around CPU and memory usage rather than actual bandwidth or server space.

Still, there are several ways in which you could find yourself having your account cut suddenly, even under seemingly normal circumstances:

1. High FTP Usage: If you use your server to store files or, as one company I worked with did, transfer large files to clients, you may be disconnected for abusing their FTP or simply taking up too much hard drive space.
2. Excessive Email Usage: Running a large email server off of an “unlimited” host is ill-advised for many reasons, the largest being hosts often cut off accounts with too much usage of their email resources, especially outgoing email. This is especially true considering many shared hosts pool email resources among all customers.
3. Violating the “Unlimted” TOS: Most hosts that offer “unlimited” service have a strict TOS that bards activity such as streaming media, image hosting and so forth. In short, even if your usage isn’t high, you may violate the terms you agreed to.

Though the odds of facing a situation such as Frogpants is very slim, it can happen and does happen fairly regularly. Your best bet is to either avoid “unlimited” hosts in general or, if you do use such a host, to not realize its limitations and read its terms carefully.

Bottom Line

In the end, I really don’t think either Bluehost or Frogpants come out of the situation looking all that great. Frogpants thought they could rely on a $7 per month account to host a major podcast network, which despite advertisements of “unlimited” hosting is pretty clearly impossible both logically and reading Bluehost’s TOS. Meanwhile, Bluehost, even with the likely crisis on their network, likely could have done more to provide warning and help Frogpants move on.

It is a sad situation but one that could have been easily avoided. Granted, much of the blame lies on hosts that make offers they know they can not fulfill and bury the truth in the fine print, but also the blame has to fall somewhat on customers who have unrealistic expectations as to what a host can provide for a price.

In the end though, if you understand the limits of what a host can provide and go into any hosting situation with open eyes, the odds of a serious problem are fairly small. Still, if you expect traffic spikes or are engaging in any activity that may make you a target for termination, you may want secure better hosting that can take the heat.

It may be more expensive, but when the need arises, you will be very glad you did.

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