What are the limits for bluehost?

[tesolnet]

Hi,

I have been using bluehost for 4 or 5 months hosting our school's website. So far I have complied strictly with TOS. My website now is nearly 11Gb of storage. Most space is used by our students' html projects. Although bluehost says there is no limit to web space storage, I'm still very concerned about being suspended or shut down.

I'm grateful for any help on these questions:

1. I don't put video/music files for storage on bluehost. But we need to upload more html projects and pictures on the website. The site may take up to 20 Gb. Is it OK with this storage space?

2. As we are going to upload more photos to the gallery, is there limit to the number of files? I have read somewhere in this forum that the number of files allowed is normally under 50.000. Also, how do I check the number of files in my account?

3. If our account gets suspended or shutdown, will we be notifed in advance and have time to backup our data?

Thank you very much.

[wysiwyg]

What format and resolution are these images in?

11gb is a lot of space. A reasonably sized jpeg is around 100-200kb (that's over 50,000 800x800 jpegs).

[Early Out]

To check how many files you've got, go to the /tmp directory of your account, and open the latest userquota file (it's just a text file) - it might be userquota.1, userquota.2, etc. The number of files you've got will be shown on the last line.

[tesolnet]

What format and resolution are these images in?

11gb is a lot of space. A reasonably sized jpeg is around 100-200kb (that's over 50,000 800x800 jpegs).

Our photos come directly from camera. They are normally 1-2 Mb each. But there may be only several hundreds.

[tesolnet]

To check how many files you've got, go to the /tmp directory of your account, and open the latest userquota file (it's just a text file) - it might be userquota.1, userquota.2, etc. The number of files you've got will be shown on the last line.

Thank you. This is my last line of the file:

Total File Count: 166694

Is this scary? I have checked. Most of the files are for the html projects. Do I get any warning or notice that our site has crossed the limits?

[wysiwyg]

That's a fairly large number of files. There are about 60,000 posts on this forum, even if each individual post were stored as a separate file, you would be using almost 3x as many as this website, and it's been around for a few years (granted, everything is stored in a database so it's only really a handful of files).

You need to find out exactly what is taking up so many files, because there is a limit on how many you can have and you are going to hit that before you get to 20gb of html files.

[felgall]

Our photos come directly from camera. They are normally 1-2 Mb each. But there may be only several hundreds.

THose files are way too big for web use. You should compress each down to under 100k before uploading them for web use. Most images suiltable for web use will be way under 100k. No one will wait around for images bigger than that to load.

[Early Out]

Thank you. This is my last line of the file:

Total File Count: 166694

Is this scary? I have checked. Most of the files are for the html projects. Do I get any warning or notice that our site has crossed the limits?

I'm surprised you haven't heard from BH already. The current stated limit is 50,000 files on an account. They won't shut you down immediately for exceeding that, but they expect you to start taking action to get below that limit.

[nitrocrzy]

My own experience is that they target larger sites. Mine got flagged because of size 40GB. They have suspended my site without notice once. That time was while I was on vacation in Vietnam. I knew I didn't have anything non-web related so I confirmed which files they had flagged. One was a site backup and the other was a zip file. I gave support permission to delete any file they deemed a violation of terms of service. Got to thinking better of that, I then contacted support to verify they only deleted those files. Long story short they went all delete happy and took out lots of files. Mainly my /tmp folder. I used this folder to host the video's and stuff for the forum. And then I learned they didn't backup the files they deleted. Worse still, they don't backup any site over 4gb period.

So, my bet is you will get flagged eventually for being over on the number of files. It's just a matter of time.

The last conversation I had with support is they are relaxing on the limit for the time being. Maybe they will reconsider the limit but I doubt it. If enough customers are ok with it then they will sacrifice the few that are over.

[redsox9]

The important thing to remember is that this is shared hosting. If you becomes a resource hog on your server, which may host several hundred accounts, then BH will go after you at some point. What you may want to do is remove some of the school projects that are no longer necessary to store online and archive them elsewhere.