I am writing this using first hand experience. One of my websites that was running quietly by itself decided to go belly up and this happened without me noticing for quite a while (blush/red face). What actually happened was a process that started filling the error log with messages and then when the account ran out of disk space, CPanel automatically took the site down – replacing it with a default page (in this case a basic Wordpress html page as the site was running wordpress and the database could not grow anymore). For whatever reason I did not see the emails notifying me about the account running out of disk space. As a result – this one specific website went offline for 2 months (!).
Now I know that this was clearly my fault and as a result I earned less money online. However, as the glass is always half full for me and not half empty there is a good take away lesson here – especially since this website is about web hosting. I am hosting many of my websites on so-called reseller web hosting accounts. I limit each account to a certain amount of disk space. If I would have hosted my website on a web hosting account with unlimited disk space instead I would have been just fine. My website did not run out of disk space because I was using GigaBytes of disk space, but it ran out of disk space because of an 80 meg error log. If I would have hosted my website on an account with unlimited disk space my site would have never been down. My website has been de-indexed from the search engines and I need to wait now until the engines find it again, re-index it, and then recognize that the site was there before and give me back my rankings.
So, the lesson I learned is fairly clear – pay more attention to my websites – even those that are designed as “set it and forget it”. My advice for you is if you are looking for web hosting or want to avoid that something like this happens to you, pick a web host that offers cheap web hosting with unlimited disk space. Here are my current favorites that fit this category + have a good reputation for high uptime and great support.
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