Usage Policy
Last Updated: October 17th, 2015
Fair Use & Equal Share Policy
HostHero customers now have access to unlimited disk space, bandwidth and data transfer. Essentially then, you can use whatever disk space and bandwidth is necessary for your web hosting needs.
What is acceptable and appropriate usage?
HostHero web hosting is continually investing in technology and support features. Our web hosting solution has specifically been designed to serve the web hosting needs of small and independently owned and operated businesses and organizations throughout the world. Since you will be hosting your website with hundreds of others on our servers in a virtual community, our offerings are really not intended to support enterprise level or large company requirements. For that, we recommend purchasing at least a virtual private server or dedicated server solution.
HostHero web hosting is a shared web hosting service, which ultimately means a number of customers' websites are hosted within the same server environment. To ensure that our hosting is first-class, reliable, and available to all customers within that server community, an individual customer's website usage cannot adversely affect the performance of other customers' sites. We monitor our servers 24/7/365 and in no way can one customer adversely affect the performance of that server. If this happens, we will take preventative measures to ensure that the entire community is protected.
Lastly, our web hosting service is intended to host websites, not backup or storage facility for users' data. Using your web hosting account primarily as an online storage space for archiving electronic files and images is strictly prohibited. Our servers are for web hosting usage only. If you use your hosting space for backups, camera footage, surveillance or FTP data storage we will delete the files/folders without prior notice as this is strictly prohibited. This includes using the server as a cloud storage service or platform. This includes but is not limited to archiving emails. This is strictly prohibited.
What is unlimited?
- Unlimited disk space:
You can create a website as large as you like, hundreds or thousands of web pages; you will not be penalized for exceeding any upper or ceiling limit. However, please realize that there are many other users on your server and growing a website very large too fast will impede the performance of that server, as using too many server resources will negatively impact other customers on that server. We will place some constraints on how fast you can grow that website and monitor the server resources closely. The vast majority of our customers' sites grow at rates well within our rules, however, and will not be impacted.
- Video & Media disk space:
For customers hosting media content such as videos, music files or image content we allow a maximum media storage allocation of 50GB on our shared hosting plans. This limit is in place only on our shared servers to ensure equal share of the servers disk space. You can host unlimited websites however the disk space for media files should not exceed 50GB. We monitor disk usage and will contact customers if they hit this limit to offer alternative hosting solutions. This same limitation applies to customers storing Cloud data.
- Unlimited bandwidth and data transfer:
This rule only comes into play when you use excess server processing power that negatively impacts the performance of the server and provides a bad customer experience in that server community. Minimizing the impact on an individual server's processing power is key to the overall performance that server. In the vast majority of cases, if you use the web hosting service appropriately, visitors to your website will be able to view, download, and add as much content from your site as they wish. However, in certain circumstances, our server processing power, server memory, or anti-abuse controls could limit downloads or access from your site. Violators to the above rule will not be tolerated. You can upload all the content that you require each month subject to the rules as outlined above.
- Unlimited Email:
You can create an unlimited number of email addresses on the Business and Premium plans and up to 10 accounts on the Starter plan. Your total email account size cannot exceed 25GB on our shared hosting plans. This is a combined total for ALL email addresses inside your cPanel hosting account. For example, if you create 20 email accounts, the combined disk space cannot exceed 25GB.
On our VPS and dedicated servers there are no restrictions as your limitations would be based on the plan you choose.
Archiving emails is strictly prohibited. To archive emails, customers need to download them locally. Storing email archives on your hosting account may result in an account suspension.
- Backups & Backup Plugins:
The use of backup software to make copies of your site content is not strictly prohibited, but automated use of that backup software is restricted. We reserve the right to disable software that is found creating backup copies of your site data on an automatic schedule. In addition, while manual use of backup plugins to make copies is permitted, those copies cannot remain on the server for more than 30 days. These backups should be downloaded from the server and archived locally. Backups older than 30 days may be deleted without warning. Plugins that fall into this category include but are not limited to: Updraft Plus, BackupBuddy, VaultPress, JetPack Backups, WP Time Capsule, BackupWPUp and BackupWordPress.
- inodes:
On our 'shared hosting' plans (Starter, Business and Premium Plans) we use 'inode limits'. An Inode is any single file or folder within your account and every file and folder within your account uses an inode. This limit is initially set to 200,000 inodes. If your account approaches or reaches this limit, Our support team can examine your use to determine if the limit needs to be increased. This increase is not guaranteed, but if we reject the increase, we will also suggest where a large number of inodes are being used unnecessarily. Increases to the inode limit are on a case-by-case basis, and specific to the account that requires the increase. Packages with hard storage caps (such as Reseller plans, Cloud hosting packages, VPS services, and dedicated servers) do not have inode limits.
For more specific terms of service, we ask that you refer to the acceptable use section of our Terms and Conditions.