I am delinquent in posting once again! I have been playing with my sites but not documenting my progress here.

When one first embarks on a journey as a Hobby Webmaster one of the first things to do, if the hobby gets serious, is to open a hosting account. I started out on free space offered by my ISP, but soon outgrew that generous allowance. Many would be fine with the amount of space offered by that account, but I like pictures and music, so the file sizes can take  up too much space. The word ‘unlimited’ begins to sound good when you know that there will be a lot of big files that you may wish to host.

I opened a hosting account on one of the *unlimited* hosts. I did read the TOS, but the fine print there didn’t ring any bells. I have recently run into the limits of my unlimited hosting account, so I will be buying additional hosting and moving some sites – a new adventure.

What are the limits to unlimited hosting? There are a few things listed in the terms of service documents that can get you into trouble. These limits are entirely within reason and should cause average users no problem, but they do exist. There are specific limits placed on resources usage. The shared hosting environment must allow all sites hosted on the server to have a reasonable level of service. If one account is a resource hog it can affect other users on the server. The specific resources are CPU usage and Memory usage, although the CPU usage is the most critical today because of relative low memory prices.

There will also be a (large) limit on the number of files hosted within the account. My current account has an absolute limit of 200,000 files and I am pushing that limit. The limit that has caused me problems is the number of tables in the databases. There is also a maximum size for databases, but that is not yet a problem.

I first ran into problems a few months ago. At the time I deleted all unused databases and disabled one unused forum. All was well with the world. Then a couple of my installed softwares came up with updates. I ran the updates without questioning the outcome. Soon my sites were locked again because I had exceeded my number of tables limits. The updates had added tables as part of their update process. I disabled my other two forums because they now have over 60 tables each. Deleting those tables (after taking a backup) got me back under the table limit and the sites were live again in just over one hour (the time to investigate the problem and decide what to do – the sites were live immediately when the hosting company had done that table audit and lifted the lock).

When the problem first arose I investigated options. The real solution to the problem is to go for VPS hosting. I am not quite ready for the expense of that option at this time. The short-term solution will be another shared hosting account and moving some of the sites to the new account. That will be a new adventure and I will try to document it here.