Have you seen these words?
This account has been suspended. Contact your hosting provider for more information.
More and more stories from people have come out regarding how their websites have been suddenly suspended. I know it stinks; I used to host with Hostgator.com, and I would see my sites with warnings from time to time. Mostly, this is due to using too many resources, but other factors can get your web hosting account suspended. When this does happen, what should you do about it? First, don’t panic because it doesn’t mean all your hard work is going down the drain. Many trustworthy hosts will resolve the matter quickly, but in a worse case scenario you can always use Snapshot; backup your WordPress site and move to a different web host.
Here are several tips that you can take into account so when this happens to you, you can just remain calm and focus on getting this issue resolved. Take a deep breath because it’s not the end of the world.
What You Must Do When Your Site Is Suspended
When a web hosting company decides to take down a website, they immediately inform their client why this has happened and the reasons behind it. Once you receive that email, you have two choices: either you get your site back up, or get your data and move on with your life. Sometimes, but not all the times they will give you the 3-7 day grace period so you can decide what you’re going to do. It does just vary from host to host.
- Contact Your Web Hosting Company – If you think your site doesn’t deserve to be suspended, immediately contact your web hosting company through a phone call or email. You can then explain your side of the story and hopefully, your host will let you off with a warning. They might just put your site back within a couple of hours.
- Think About Your Options – Only your web host can decide your fate with their company. For example, if you were using too many resources, your web host may ask you to pay the excess fees and require you to upgrade to a larger shared hosting plan or VPS, or worst case scenario, you’ll be terminated for good. If you’re terminated for good, you should be able to go into your FTP and download all your content. Provided you didn’t do anything illegal to get your website suspended.
Reasons Why Websites Are Suspended
Several issues can cause a website to be suspended. It can be an honest mistake made by the web host, a misunderstanding, or you might have overlooked some things that caught the web host’s attention. But, don’t worry it’s a pretty common problem.
- Billing Concerns – If your hosting is up for renewal and you weren’t charged for it, or you weren’t able to pay for it, then your account will be suspended pending payment. Commonly, people have problems with 1&1 where they forget to update their credit card on file and they get shut down. Once, you pay your bill your service will be restored. You might want to make sure you contact them if you don’t have the money and want to ensure that your content doesn’t get deleted.
- High Server Usage – If you’re on a shared web hosting plan and you use up too many of the server’s resources. Produces a negative impact on other users that’s why your web host has to suspend your account. You can install caching plugins like WP Total Cache & WP Super Cache (my preferred caching plugin), which should reduce the server load.
- Plagiarism – Your account gets immediately suspended once you use copyrighted texts or images on your web pages without proper consent. It’s a good idea to use Copyscape on your website to help protect your content. If you copied content from somewhere, there is a good chance someone filed a DMCA takedown notice with your host. Web hosting companies take these very seriously and will suspend you in a heartbeat for this.
- Spamming – Excessive spamming on other websites to promote your site will surely get the attention of your web host. Spamming is an automatic suspension. Sometimes email accounts do get hacked, and you don’t realize that tons and tons of emails are being sent out through your account.
- Phishing – Phishing is the act of getting personal information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by pretending to sell things online. Phishing gets an automatic suspension and may face lawsuits. Sometimes some viruses are installed on your website that contains malware that attempts to phish. You can have your host run a virus scan on your site if you suggest foul play.
- Hosting Illegal Content – Illegal content includes but not limited to, pirated movies, music, and software. Illegal content is a serious problem which will not only lead to the suspension of your account; you’ll be facing a lawsuit as well. The fines for this are very high; enough to sink a small business.
- Terms of Service Violations – Each web host has a Terms of Service (TOS). Once you violate one of the rules and regulations, your account will be suspended in no time.
To avoid your website from getting suspended, be sure to read all the rules carefully before you check that “I Agree” button. Commonly, there are some things you should take to heart before signing any contract with a hosting company. A lot of the “fine print” is sneaky. It’s important you don’t get conned by “fine print.” When you’re sure that you’ve complied with their terms, you don’t have to worry about anything. Hopefully, if your website is suspended, this article gives you a piece of mind. Please leave your comments down below. Thanks for reading!
Very important info, especially for the less techie of us.
I have heard a few stories recently so thanks for sharing this information.
Adam
No problem. It’s a very common thing that happens with a lot of different hosts.
It’s a very frustrating to know your account is suspended. Well, there are reasons hosting provider gives you. I think the best option in the event of failing to resolve the issues with your current hosting provider is to change the hosting provider.
I agree. Sometimes it’s better to just count your losses.
This is helpful to me – for the past month my website has been up and down, fast and slow, and sometimes just disappears altogether. I’ve had to make several calls to technical support and I finally reached someone who had an answer. He told me that someone on my shared server had a script on their site that was consuming the majority of the resources.
They must have located the customer who was causing trouble, as I’ve had no issues like that lately. It’s helpful to understand the issues you’ve talked about in this article… there is so much to know!
Thanks for sharing your knowledge!
Yeah, one bad apple can screw it up for everyone. Some hosting companies don’t monitor their client’s activity very well. If the problem does persist, you might ask that they transfer your website to another shared server. A lot of the times this will solve the problem almost instantly. If it keeps happening over and over again, you might want to think about migrating to a new hosting provider.
Hi there, one of my websites is very small, about 20 pages and gets low traffic – according to Google Analytics about 30-40 visitors a day over the past few years and I was on the lowest level package from my hosting provider. In March they moved a number of websites to a new platform and suddenly my usage has escalated and they are saying I have to upgrade to two levels higher as I am getting far more visitors. I have shown them the Google Analytics shows no change in traffic. They replied by saying GA only records a visitor if some code gets downloaded which indicates it is a real visitor whereas their software records any touch with the website as a visitor. Their stats is recording 20-30 visitors extra a day at approx 1Mb each. If these are not true visitors then surely 1Mb is too high for a non-visitor (whatever it is )? This is excluding robots etc which they do report on separately and hardly take up any data. After 2 months of arguing and my site being suspended a few times as my data limit has been reached, I have relented and upgraded. Was just wondering if you have any insight on this? Thanks! *Mandy
Hi there,
You lost me there with the hosting plans. What’s the difference between cloud hosting and VPS? I am a little confused. Thank you.
Hey Cathy,
Cloud acts as a server that is built on a cloud. Meaning the servers don’t have a remote location. Here is an article about cloud hosting:
https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/cloud/cloud_hosting.htm
A VPS server is a server that is partitioned out with fewer users and your VPS acts as an independent server. Here is a video that explains VPS hosting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F8Z5Yyb7jE
Hopefully, this helps you. Please let me know if you have any more questions 🙂
Hey Mandy,
Honestly, your website should be fine with 30-40 unique visitors per day. Perhaps a DDOS attack was on your site, or there is a plugin or some kind of script that was causing high resource usage. Some companies actually do oversell their servers, though. It’s a very common problem with shared hosting.
Which web hosting provider were you using?
Thanks Garen. It is not a WordPress site, it was built using Sitezen which is no longer being supported so I have to redo my website on new software, grrr… and apparently no ways of transferring the site from the old to new software. I don’t really want to mention the service provider’s name as they have been very helpful normally, it is in South Africa and maybe they are just a bit out of touch with latest gremlins that might be affecting web traffic. If I have some time one day I will compare their logs and Google Analytics and try to identify the extra ‘visitors’ and maybe get to the bottom of this. But the upgraded package is not very costly so I am living with it for now. *Mandy
My account is terminated by InfinityFree hosting because they say my service – whatever that means – was a target of a DDoS attack. But was it? I just don’t believe it for several reasons:
– Eleven days before my account got suspended, I received a warning email that said my account had used over 50% of my daily resource limit (CPU usage). When I saw the graph at Account Statistics on my cPanel it was only about 65%. So I haven’t reached a 100% limit. And it means I don’t violate their terms and usage.
What I did at that time was making a backup of my WordPress site with the UpdraftPlus plugin before I upgraded my WordPress to version 5.5 through FileZilla. I don’t know why but it took about one hour and a half to back up my site to the external site and it also took about an hour to upload the updated WordPress although my backup files are less than 100MB. My site was still under development and not yet alive – I used under construction plugin.
The reason I did these because my WordPress crashed and couldn’t be used when I updated my WordPress to a newer version. So deleted it and reinstalled it and I tried again to update it from inside my WordPress but it crashed again. So I looked in the InfinityFree Forum for a solution and I found out I wasn’t the only one who had this crashed problem. Turned out iFastNet, the company that maintains the InfinityFree servers hadn’t updated the Softaculous installer for updating WordPress software to the latest version. People in the Forum suggested that I should update my WordPress manually because we don’t know when iFastNet would update the Softaculous installer. And I did what they suggested a week later since they hadn’t updated the Softaculous installer. The update was successful except it took a long time to process.
– Then I got an email that my account was suspended because I had exceeded my usage limit or because of abuse. and then I got another email that said my service was a target of DDoS attacks and terminated my account. They said I should find another host with DDoS protection.
Aren’t their servers already protected from DDoS attacks?
– They didn’t waste time, I got another email four minutes later which offer me to upgrade my free account to a paid account from iFastNet Premium which is very expensive from an unknown web hosting company.
I don’t want to host my site in this company considering they hadn’t updated the Softaculous installer immediately. I really doubt their support will be helpful if we have problems.
My conclusion is InfinityFree just gave a lame excuse to kick me out of their web host because one time I used about 65% CPU usage time that was allocated to my site which wasn’t my fault either.
Hostgator is very quick to suspend accounts. It’s really not fair and a lot of EIG companies have done this a lot. The culprit is always high CPU usage, RAM, and limiting processes. I think it’s just a tactic to get people to upgrade to VPS or dedicated servers.
This thread drives home what I already suspected about Hostgator:
https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1457470
Hey Wendy,
I do agree and have read countless articles that show Hostgator is very quick to suspend accounts. On their shared servers they limit processes to 25. If you have more than 1 site on a shared server, this can cause 25 processes to open in close, and you will get a notice from them shortly after that.
I have seen MochaHost do this to lots of people to:
https://tbwhs.com/mochahost-review/
I personally tried them, and my site was almost immediately asked to move to a VPS after a site that gets no traffic couldn’t be supported on their shared server. It was sad!
Hi, friends I do have a site name called facebookcoverphotos.org. I got regular infringement mail from Facebook and GoDaddy. Once they made the temporary suspension. So I renamed all contents. As after next month, they suspended permanently. This makes any sense. As I got a domain name from GoDaddy, so they have to suspend domain name, but why are they suspending my hosting. Any ideas to solve?
I would need more information to look into this further. I believe “Facebook” is a trademark. Therefore, you can not own a site with those words in it. As far as suspended you hosting account that does not make sense.
My hosting service was recently erroneously or wantonly terminated based on a service dispute twenty days prior to the expirations of the service contract — the host never rectified a chronic compliant, and I stated that the lack of service warrants a refund, but that doesn’t warrant a termination without consultation. At this point, the host has responded to providing access to FTP so as to allow HTML/PHP files and settings, etc to be downloaded. My concern is with obtaining an EPP/authorization code for the appropriate transfer to new/suitable host. Please advise.