I have posted a few questions to their support board. Hope to get an answer fast.

Hostgator here... works good but you need the hack to limit the amount of outgoing emails to 200. I have over 800 members on my site.

SVT

I've been on Hostgator its good reliable hosting. Be sure to look for a hosting coupon at one of the web hosting review sites before signing up.

I am now on Downtown Host which is also awesome, but a smaller company which I like.

What ever you do don't sign up for any hosting with out phone support.

I did. They offered me their dedicated plan.

I can't really understand that the most users I had ever online was 400. Most of the time, I have less than a hundred simultaneous online users in my forum and they wanted to me to upgrade to dedicated.

I also got into trouble with them for the inactivity mod... for sending out 200 emails at a time.

Now my account was again suspended for this.
Hello,

This message is to advise you of a temporary block placed on a file or folder under your account. The account referenced above was found to be consuming an inordinate amount of system resources, to the point of degrading overall system performance.

While we do limit each account to no more than 25% of a system's CPU in our terms of service, we do not actively disable accounts until they greatly exceed that number, which is what happened in this case. Fortunately, we were able to isolate the cause to a small set of files/folders. Rather than disabling the entire account, we were able to disable just those files/folders.

It was necessary to disable these items to maintain a minimum level of proper service for everyone else. From this point, the following options are available:

a) Block heavy users of your site, if any, that may be causing excessive load.
b) Optimize scripts (php, etc) that may be consuming a large amount of cpu.
c) Upgrade to a dedicated server; your site may have outgrown a shared environment.

Please let us know if you have a solution you feel would resolve this issue. Should a solution not be forthcoming, we are happy to assist you with an upgrade to dedicated services, where your site will have room to grow without affecting other customers. I appreciate your attention to this matter. Thank you.

Log of activity:
[root@gator## ~]# scores
Top Host : my forum
Top 5 Reqs :
43 <my forum>

22004 S <my forum> 50.00% 0.02s GET /images/smilies/Yahoo/1.gif H
21618 S <my forum> 10.53% 0.19s GET /showthread.php?t=28358 HTTP/
21603 S <my forum> 7.69% 0.13s GET /forum.php HTTP/1.1
22011 S <my forum> 7.69% 0.13s GET /showthread.php?t=27800 HTTP/
21670 S <my forum> 7.14% 0.14s POST /misc.php?show=ccbmessages H
...and the list goes on and on...

In fairness, hostgator support USED to be fast and efficient. It would usually take less than an hour for me to resolve my issues... but now, the shortest waiting period for me is 3 hours.

Anyway, you go figure it out. I still agree that HG is great... but I'm looking for a better deal.

Oh, BTW, there is a 10 mb limit in uploading files if you are using the shared plan

Not sure if i understand this list. Showing an image (1.gif) uses 50% of the server resources?

Every time I've emailed them, I get a reply in about an hour (4 hours tops on weekends). Good uptime...and there is NOT a 10mb limit on shared, I just uploaded a 90mb file a few hours ago.

Never tried sending out mass email, so don't know about that. But I routinely have around 30-60 members online and no trouble here.

I use HostGator, have for about 2 years now. Check my sig for site link.

You can attach a 90mb file in a vBulletin post? Are you using a shared hosting?

--------------- Added [DATE]1199849727[/DATE] at [TIME]1199849727[/TIME] ---------------

Same here.

They aren't bad if you don't mind being on a shared server with only reseller permissions. If you want root access to a server I like the VPS solution and have had great luck with ServInt.com.

I want to follow up my question that you can upload more than 10 mb of file in vBulletin under a shared plan.