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Alert

HostMonster has really gone downhill

Jun 7, 2012 4:09AM PDT

Interesting that I don't see any recent comments on HostMonster here. Be very wary of HostMonster. After three years of hosting my site and providing reasonably good service, they recently started a "Terms of Service Compliance Department" and have shut my Web site down three times in the last two months because of what they call excessive database size. The problem is that they have two measurements of database size: CPanel and phpMyAdmin. CPanel routinely reports massively larger database size than phpMyAdmin, often on the order of 2Gb larger. HostMonster has told me to use phpMyAdmin as the more accurate indicator of size, but they use the CPanel figure to shut down the database. I've kept a daily record of the differences and sent those records to them on a daily basis asking for them to help me understand what's going on and how to remedy it. They have responded after an enormous effort. They now are saying that a database with an absolute total of 200Mb of data on their site often has a total size of 3Gb for an overhead that is 9,999,999,999 the size of the data. They claim CPanel reports the actual size while phpMyAdmin reports only the size of the data. Trying to get them to clarify this only results in tremendous obfuscation. When I call them, they talk nebulously about page cache sizes in CPanel and delays in updating, but never give any real explanation. Ultimately, every time they have shut my Web site down, they have reopened it -- even though I have done nothing to change the size of my database. Somehow it miraculously gets smaller in CPanel just as the result of my calling them. Many, many people have found that what HostMonster is really doing is providing you with several years of good service then trying to bludgeon you into upgrading -- only to find that after upgrading, their service and performance is substantially degraded, not improved. If you don't want to get repeated, threatening emails about your database size and have your Web site repeatedly shut down, look elsewhere for hosting.

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