Getting shut down by your hosting provider
The sudden increase of traffic can cause some alarm bells to go of at your hosting provider. Some server administrators will mistake the ridiculously high hits on your site for a DDoS attack and take your site offline.

You can prevent this from happening by letting your hosting provider know that a page from your site made the front page of Digg. This is, of course, providing you know you have been Dugg.

Another reason, your web hosting provider might have, to take your site offline, is that your account has used up it’s available traffic resources. A page with only a few images and scripts can easily add up to a few hundred kb of data being transferred on a single page load.

Looking at my website statistics, it seems that my average page size is about 35 KB. If I would be running on a hosting account with a 10 GB a month data limit, I would be able to serve about 285.000 pages a month. That is plenty for most sites, but being on the front page of Digg can drive crazy amounts of visitors to your site, which can chew up your 10 GB plan in no time.

But there is something that can be far worse than having your site taken offline for reaching the bandwidth limit: it’s having your site stay online after using up your monthly bandwidth and

being presented with a bandwidth over usage bill.
Most hosting providers have ridiculous fees for any bandwidth you use on top of what’s included in your hosting plan. This happened to me last year. One of my dedicated servers used more than the plans bandwidth. The bill I was presented was quite high, but I managed to get the hosting provider to cancel the bill.

Having your site shut down or being billed extra can be easily avoided. In case the billing or shutdown would be caused by exceeding your hosting plans allowed amount of traffic, you can simply make your pages smaller. Avoid over usage of images, as they are the biggest items on any page, byte size wise. The images used on your page could be saved with a little higher compression ratio or you could offload the images to a different hosting account to share the bandwidth load. If you don’t have a second hosting account, you could host the images on a free image hosting site, there are plenty of free ones available to you.

It is also very common to have your hosting account disabled for using to much of the servers resources. This won’t happen on a dedicated server, but if you are on a shared hosting account, they can shut your site down for putting too much stress on the servers processor, which will affect other clients websites hosted on the same server. This too is easy to avoid. Have a look at your WordPress blog. Everything is stored in a database. The blog title, the tagline, the post title, the post text, the categories, the tags and much more.

When a page is requested for viewing, the software will read all the necessary information from the database. Compiling a single page involves running a lot of queries. Your web server is good at running queries and retrieving the needed information from the database at lightning speeds, but there are limits. With a few dozen page requests every second, the server will soon have trouble keeping up. Remember that there can easily be over a hundred other websites running on the same server.

Running all these queries to build a single page is not really necessary though, once the page has been created by the php code, it can be stored as a static html file. The next visitor can be presented with the html output directly, which probably uses at least 90% less processing power. Don’t worry if this sounds a bit too technical to you, there is an easy way to implement this method in your WordPress blog, its called caching and there is a nice plugin available: WP Super Cache by Donncha O Caoimh

Don’t wait implementing these until you hit the front page of Digg. Once you are on the page, there will not be much you can do. These measures should be in place before the traffic avalanche hits you. Even if it never happens, it’s better to be save than sorry. So, be prepared!

Some domain registrars have high fees to transfer your domain to another registrar. easyspace.com, for example, charges $22 to transfer your domain or $37 to change the owner! Their 45 page long Terms & Conditions includes:

You agree that you may not transfer a domain name registration to another domain name registrar during the first sixty (60) days from the effective date of the initial domain name registration with us. After that time, you may transfer your domain name registration to a third party domain name registrar of your choice, subject to our then-current policies and procedures incorporated herein by reference.

Note the marked part! Basically they can add whatever they want after you have agreed! I use Dynadot for all my domain registrations and they don’t charge for domain transfers or owner changes at all and they have some of the lowest pricing.

The same kind of hidden fees can be found with hosting services. The dedicated servers I have running all come with 2000GB of traffic included and I used about another 20GB on one of them. Yes, 20GB is a lot of traffic, more than most shared hosting plans include, but in this case it was only 1% more then I had paid for. The invoice I got, on top of my regular hosting fee, was enough to cover the expenses for another dedicated server, plus setup cost!

Already knowing about the high price of usage beyond the plans included bandwidth, I always keep a close eye on how much I use. But it turned out that the traffic reports you can view in cpanel are not what the billing is based on. The traffic used on the server is measured at the switch that the server is connected to. You can see those numbers too, but only after you ask for it!

After opening a support ticket for this issue, I got the standard reply. Something like: I can’t help you, the invoice has been created and has to be paid or your server will be taken offline. After mailing with both the support and billing departments a few times, and basically being told the same shit again, I looked up who is in charge and gave him a call. Within a few minutes I had access to the traffic stats on the switch and the extra bandwidth bill had been canceled. It’s all about talking to the right guy.

Costs like these are often not easy to spot. The endlessly long terms & conditions you have to agree upon are almost always too long to read and even if you manage to read the whole thing, you will probably not understand half of it because of the way things are formulated.

But don’t despair, sites like Web Hosting Talk are a good place to find out about which hosting provider is good and which ones will screw you. Remember Google is your friend, when it comes to finding reviews about companies. Do your homework before signing up for anything!

A server running on Linux is usually cheaper, because it doesn’t require an expensive software license like Windows servers. Php and MySQL are also free to run unlike Microsoft’s SQL server.

Another option would be to host your website at home, but I would not recommend it, even if you have the knowledge to run your own server. No matter how well you manage your server, there are tons of things that can go wrong and bring your website down. When things go wrong it is usually when you are not there to fix it, preferably when you just left for a long weekend away. When you sign up for a hosting account, the hosting provider will look after the server and make sure your website is accessible day and night.