Important: Free Hosting Before You Get Started Guide Print

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This article explains all free hosting limitations not listed in our web hosting comparison chart and clarifies the motivation behind them. Please read this guide thoroughly in order to avoid account misuse, suspension or even termination.

1. Resource usage

Offering free web hosting is neither easy nor free for the ones that offer it. Although our free hosting users do not pay any fees this does not mean that setting up and maintaining the actual free hosting platform does not involve any costs. Actually it is quite the opposite. These are just some of the recurring monthly costs: server hardware, server electricity consumption, server software, system administration, technical support, fraud and abuse prevention etc. In order to cover the combined cost of the above mentioned our entire free hosting servers operation has to be as efficient as possible, which means putting a great number of free hosting users per free hosting server and this is only technically possible if the resources that each free hosting account uses are very limited. Contrary to the common misconception and due to the complexity of the entire web hosting, disk space and monthly traffic are not the only limits necessary to keep your site, database, email etc up and running. Here are the most important measures that we monitor for each free hosting account:

- Disk Space - 1GB. On a paid hosting you receive Unlimited disk space.

- Monthly Traffic - 10GB/month. On a paid hosting account you receive Unlimited disk space.

-CPU usage (servers processor usage) - maximum 16% average CPU usage. On a paid hosting account you get up to 100% CPU

- RAM (both physical and Virtual memory) - maximum 100MB for physical memory usage. On a paid hosting account you get up to 1536MB physical memory and 1GB virtual memory

- Entry processes (number of concurrent processes towards the web server) - up to 5 processes. On a paid hosting account you get up to 20 processes

- Number of process (total number of processes launched by your account) - up to 10 processes. On a paid hosting account you get up to 30 processes

- Disk IO (input output disk operations) -256 kb/s. On a paid hosting account you get 1024 kb/s for disk IO

- Disk Inodes (the number of files and/or directories in a web hosting account) - up to 25 000 inodes. On a paid hosting account you get up to 250 000 Inodes

- Mysql CPU usage and Mysql Disk IO - maximum 2% average CPU usage 256 kb/s for disk IO. On a paid hosting account you get 30% for MySQL CPU and 1024 kb/s for MySQL disk IO

- Max 1 cronjob with maximum frequency of 1 hour. On a paid hosting account you can setup cronjobs that run every minute

- Max 1 email per hour - in order to prevent spam this measure although a bit restrictive is indeed necessary. On a paid hosting account you can send up to 250 emails per hour

Badly exceeding any of these parameters can even cause the entire server to go down and with this all sites and applications hosted will become unreachable. We cannot allow this to happen that is why we use a specialized shared hosting OS called cloudlinux. It acts as light weight virtualization system that isolates each user resources into virtual containers, so that one misbehaving user cannot affect other users hosted on the same server (more info at cloudlinux.com). Despite that if too many free hosting users start overusing their allocated resources at the same time this will again place a heavy load on the server and will cause either slow performance or downtime. Therefore we are forced to suspend users who systematically use a great portion of the resources mentioned above or max out some or several of these resources for a considerable amount of time. In order to sustain a reliable free hosting platform for 99% of our users 1% of the top resource using accounts are suspended after notifying them and giving them a few days to either upgrade their account to a paid hosting plan or make a back up of their site and move it elsewhere. Please be kind to the server resources, optimize your scripts, optimize your MySQL database queries, install only plugins that you really need and know that are reputable, do not set up more than 1 cronjob or set up a cronjob with frequency smaller than 1 hour.

If you are interetsed in upgrading your free hosting account please see this knowledgebase article.

2. Free Hosting Account Inactivity

As part of the above mentioned free hosting platform optimization and efficiency we also need to make sure that all accounts that are not used by our users are deleted to free up space for new accounts.

A free hosting account with us is marked for suspension either if you have less than 1 MB of disk space uploaded and/or less than 1 MB of monthly traffic until the end of the current month. In order not to have your account suspended and terminated due to inactivity you should meet both requirements:
1. Have at least 1 MB of disk space uploaded at any time.
2. Have at least 1 MB of monthly traffic generated by the 25th of the current month.
If you do not feel comfortable with the above mentioned policy you can upgrade your account to avoid your account being further suspended due to inactivity. If your account has been suspended due to inactivity please feel free to request account recreation.

Our paid hosting accounts do not have inactivity period so if you are interetsed in upgrading your free hosting account please see this knowledgebase article.

3.Forbidden resource overusage sites policy for free hosting accounts

In order to keep our free hosting servers up and running and their performance at a good level there are certain type of web sites and application that we do not allow on our free hosting plans.

- Web cams, IP cams and any type of applications that frequently upload or delete files or just connect too frequently or overuse the FTP server are strictly forbidden and will be terminated without prior notification. If you plan to run such a service it could be run only from a VPS or Dedicated Server.

- Proxy sites are strictly forbidden and will be terminated without any prior notice. If you would like to use a proxy site this would be possible on our paid hosting plans, but if your proxy site is popular you might even need a VPS or a Dedicated server.

- Adults sites are only allowed on our paid hosting plans and any user hosting an adult site on a free hosting account will be suspended.

- Hotlinking is absolutely forbidden on free hosting accounts. You will need at least our personal or business hosting plan and your site is popular you might also need a VPS or a Dedicated Server.

- Multiple free hosting accounts will be suspended. Each free hosting user is entitled to only 1 free hosting account

- Rapidleech sites are strictly forbidden on a free hosting plan. If you would like to host such site you need at least a business hosting plan, VPS or even a Dedicated server if your site is more popular.

- Bots are not allowed on free hosting accounts. You need a business hosting plan if your script is light or VPS or Dedicated server for heavier scripts.

- File storage is not allowed on the free hosting plans.

- Streaming of any sort is absolutely forbidden on free hosting accounts. You need one of our paid hosting plan, VPS or a Dedicated server if your site is a high ranking one.

- Torrent sites are strictly forbidden on all our plans except for our Dedicated servers.

If you are interetsed in upgrading your free hosting account please see this knowledgebase article.

4. Illegal sites

- Phishing is absolutely forbidden on any of our hosting plans and will not only be terminated but will also be reported to the related authorities.

- Sending unsolicited bulk messages (spam) is strictly forbidden on any of our hosting plans

- Setting up scam web sites with the purpose of defrauding are strictly forbidden and will also be reported to the related authorities.

- Hosting or distributing malware is strictly forbidden

- Hosting or linking to illegal pornography like child pornography or any other form of illegal adult content will not only be terminated but will also be reported to the related authorities.

- DDOS attacks are strictly forbidden on any of our hosting plans

- Hacking is not allowed on any of our plans

 

5. Contacting us for support while using free hosting

Host-ed.net is eager to help each customer whether free or paid, yes we even aim to treat free hosting customers with the necessary respect and attention. The problem with answering to free hosting requests is that there are way too many and are not economically sustainable unless certain rules and optimization practices are followed. We do not force any of our free hosting customers to upgrade their account and if you are not interested in upgrading you can help up the following ways:

a) We kindly ask free hosting customers NOT to contact us over the chat unless interested in upgrading/signing up for new a paid hosting account. An average chat takes way more time and occupies the attention of a support staff for 20-30 minutes on average. During that time the employee is paid a working wage which is unfortunately it is not economically justified. Have you ever tried contacting Google or Facebook regarding a regular free user matters. Even if you are a sizable Adwords publisher you will still be happy getting a response in 24 hours. In addition to that most of the top biggest paid hosting providers do not provide support over the chat for their top paid hosting customers.

b) The same from above is valid for phone support

c) The support method that we offer is opening a trouble ticket from your control panel or sending an email to support (at) host-ed (dot) me. Before doing so please first:

- Go through our knowledge base http://www.host-ed.me/members/knowledgebase.php

- Login to your cpanel and check the and visit the first two sections "Getting Started Wizard" and "Video Tutorials" there you will find really easy to use tutorials and helpful tips.

- Finally you can also look up the problem that you are experiencing in google or your local search engine. Since cpanel is the words most popular hosting control panel and is being used by millions there is a very high chance of someone else having the same problem and sharing its resolution.

We'd rather work on developing a new and better products or improve our existing ones instead of answering the same questions 100s of times a month while these same questions are already comprehensively answered in easy to understand English in our knowledgebase. Example:

- How do I change my password, or I cannot login to my cpanel http://www.host-ed.me/members/knowledgebase.php?action=displaycat&catid=14

- What are my FTP credentials this is present in both welcome email and knowledge base http://www.host-ed.me/members/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id=10

- What is MySQL database hostname http://www.host-ed.me/members/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id=13

- What are host-ed.net name servers - present in our welcome email and knowledgebase http://www.host-ed.me/members/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id=1

- How do I close/cancel/delete my account - http://www.host-ed.me/members/knowledgebase.php?action=displaycat&catid=6

 

6. Scripts and application limits that would NOT be working on our free hosting

- Mbstring is not availble for free hosting accounts it is available on all paid plans

- Mcrypt is not availble for free hosting accounts it is available on all paid plans

- MySQLi is not availble for free hosting accounts it is available on all paid plans

- PDO is not availble for free hosting accounts it is available on all paid plans

- PDO MySQL is not availble for free hosting accounts it is available on all paid plans

- PHP memory_limit on free hosting accounts is 32M while on paid hosting account you can increase it to 1024M

- PHP upload_max_filesize on free hosting accounts is 2M while on paid hosting account you can increase it to 512M

- PHP max_execution_time on free hosting accounts is 15 seconds while on paid hosting account you can increase it to 300 seconds

- FTP max upload size on free hosting accounts is 5MB while on paid hosting account there is no limit

In case you get a generic error 500 you are most probably reaching one of the above mentioned limits.

If you are interetsed in upgrading your free hosting account please see this knowledgebase article.


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