Sometimes I check out other hosting and VPS providers, mostly as some kind of procrastination. The latest company I looked at had some alarming claims, contradicted by their Acceptable Use Policy. I’m going to take the opportunity to outline these for you. They’re fairly common amongst hosting and VPS providers and proof that you need to be careful who you host with.

The company in question offer unlimited bandwidth and storage on their sales pages, but their Acceptable Use Policy clearly states:

For websites that allow downloading of video, audio or other files we reserve the right to impose a bandwidth limit of twenty-five (25) gigabytes

Wait. 25gb? I thought it was unlimited? Perhaps this is Talk Talk’s version of “Unlimited Broadband”; you can only download a fairly restrictive amount per month, but it’s unlimited because you can use it any time! (I’m not kidding by the way, check out Talk Talk’s policies)

Prohibited Uses

Prohibited uses are usually pretty standard, in this case some pretty interesting points showed up:

use more than 5 % of our server’s processing capacity

Well, it’s good to know they’re overselling their servers to that degree.

run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes or any daemons

This one is very interesting. It means you’re not allowed to actually have an operating system, use a web server, mail server etc.

run cron entries or other scheduled tasks other than by configuring them through our control panel

Well, that immediately stops me installing cPanel (or pretty much any third party control panel) on their VPS. You’d think their ridiculous 5% processing capacity clause would cover this…

There are also a number of other interesting points, like not using any part of their service for backup purposes.

I know web hosting is a pretty competitive business, but some of these contradictions should be dealt with by the Advertising Standards Authority, Trading Standards or some other appropriate organization.

Thanks to Heart Internet for unwittingly being the target of this entry.