Fuck You, IX Web Hosting

The BBQ Pit
1

I have my personal web site, and it’s used pretty much for two things – family photos, and my football pool. Today, I get a couple of e-mails from players in the pool wondering why they’re being asked for a username and password when they go to my site.

Bwuh? I have no such restriction on my site, lemme see. Sure enough, a window pops up looking for a login. I check my e-mail and find a message from my host, the titular IX Web Hosting, letting me know I’ve exceeded my allocated space on the server, so they were suspending my account.

Now, exceeding my allocated space would be a pretty fucking good trick. See, I have their Business Plus Plan, which is advertised as “Disk Storage - UNLIMITED”. How I exceeded “unlimited”, I have no idea. Perhaps I inadvertently uploaded the entirety of the internet onto my site? I mean, that still wouldn’t go against the definition of “unlimited”, but I could see them being a teensy bit curious about it.

But no, I called them up and found that to them, “Unlimited” means “When we feel you’re using too much of the server”. They put a bunch of people on a server, and if one is using more than the others, then they get this smackdown. But if everyone is using roughly the same amount (no matter how much it is), then all is kosher, so they get to keep their bullshit “unlimited” claim.

“What you need,” the customer service rep tells me, “is a dedicated server, not a shared server.”

“Uh huh…and how much more is it for that plan?”

“Oh, we don’t offer them.”
:smack:

Once football season is over, kiss my ass goodbye, IX.

2

Switch to DreamHost. They have very cheap plans, and while the storage space is not unlimited, it’s pretty freaking close. So is everything else - bandwidth, the number of domains you can host, email accounts you can have, etc.

I am currently storing 110G on my account, for something like $15 / month I think.

3

Can they legally do that? Is there a clause in whatever contract you have that specifies that unlimited does in fact mean whatever limit they arbitrarily choose? Sure sounds like false advertising to me.

Are there consumer organizations that can give people like that a good beating?

4

Just out of interest, in your case how much was too much?

Are we talking a few hundred meg? A few gig? Tens or hundreds of gigs?

5

This is the sort of story that the Consumerist website just loves. They are constantly publishing people’s personal experiences with this sort of thing.

6

I checked and found no mention of a limit on their website. A quick look at some reviews showed that quite a few people had had problems with downtime, getting locked out and slow support response.

Seems like you might be able to give them a small taste of just desserts. Provided you care to, obviously.

7

For all your hosting needs

I have no affiliation with the company, other than being a (very) satisfied customer for almost three years now.

8

They say I have around 56 gigs on there. Thing is, I think they might be wrong by a factor of 10. I keep all my stuff backed up on my hard drive, and a quick scan of that shows it to be about 5.5 gigs.

It’s bad enough that they pulled this shit in the first place, but if it’s because they’re bad at math, then I’m going to be fricking livid.

9

I searched their TOS and found “Section IV. ‘Fair-Use’ Resource Assignment”, which first states:

And then goes on to say that while it’s their intention to do this, they can still say “Naaa…fuck you, delete your files”.

However, the following gem appears in their section on “Data Transfer and Disk Usage”:

Busted, d-bags. The first e-mail notification I got was from the players in my football pool wondering why the hell they couldn’t get to the site to submit their picks. IX didn’t send me squat until they already shut me down.

10

56 gigs? They’re busting you over 56 gigs? It is to laugh!

11

Ixian technology just ain’t what it used to be.