Go to almost any WordPress hosting provider and you’ll see the word unlimited used a lot. I don’t mind paying a little extra per month for improved performance and even more so if I can get a dedicated IP address for my plan. And that was the case for me with Hostwinds.com until last week when I was forced to move my sites to a new hosting provider after being down several hours.
It all started when I got a notification from uptimerobot that my site was throwing a 503 error. And then I got more notifications about 503 errors for some other sites I host. Upon investigating further I discovered all the sites on my Hostwinds plan were down with 503 errors. Naturally I contacted their support department and they informed me that my sites weren’t really down. “We verified the websites are currently working at our end.” WTF!
Here are actual quotes from my Hostwinds support tickets:
“I understand that you are experiencing issues with the website. Upon investigation, it’s apparent that your site has exceeded resource limits, including CPU and I/O usage, within the past 24 hours….Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you require further assistance or have any queries.”
Naturally I required further assistance and opened a new support ticket in which I learned that my unlimited hosting account was in fact not unlimited.
Quoting again from my Hostwinds support ticket:
“The resource limit is placed on a per-user account basis on a shared server environment. The resource usage will be monitored live, and the website will frequently not work whenever your cpanel account exceeds a resource limit. You can review the current resource usage utilized by your cpanel account using the “Resource Usage” feature in cpanel. Below is the screenshot showing the current resource usage of your cpanel account.”
“We notice that your account’s physical memory and I/O usage have been exceeded. Since you have a shared plan in which you are using multiple domains, the physical memory consumption is calculated including the usage of all the hosted websites on your cpanel account. Therefore, please audit the website contents and optimize them with the help of the developer to minimize resource consumption. We verified the websites are currently working at our end.”
And more restating the obvious but not actually providing any assistance with my issue. Why have I been paying for managed support all these years.
“Please be informed that the resources are limited since you are using a shared hosting plan. In a Cloud Linux-based shared hosting environment, once a website account reaches its limit of set resources, the site will begin to slow down. The website account consuming too many resources will temporarily stop working until resource usage returns normally.”
By this point my support request had bounced around 3-4 different people over several hours. One engineer was able to identify 2 sites which on his end appeared to be causing the issues.
Both of the sites had wp-con running and on one of the sites the WordPress theme had completely broken and was showing html and CSS syntax everwhere. But honestly I have no idea what the issue was because these sites had been hosted as is at Hostwinds for several years.
I used to work for a web hosting company as a Tier 3 engineer. I understand the stress and pressure that one can experience in that role so I was polite in my engagements but I was colossally frustrated and unsatisfied with Hostwinds support. They promoted their hosting plan as unlimited and it’s not. No where in the marketing documentation does it mention resource utilization limits. Additionally part of the monthly fee for hosting is for managed service which means they’re supposed to help you when you have issues. 90% of my engagement with their support department was providing me screen captures of the Cpanel dashboard. Only 1 engineer bothered to look into my issue and actually offer help.
After being down for 4 hours I started moving all my sites to a new hosting provider and was off the Hostwinds server a few hours later. Naturally after moving all my sites the resource utilization went to zero. LOL.
In the end despite the heartburn it was a valuable learning experience. My sites are now with a service provider that is actually several dollars per month cheaper than Hostwinds and my account has literally 10x more resources for utilization. Thanks for reading.
