Limitless Hosting - suspending site without any warning, bad support, bad uptime

Ion3198 · February 2023

I wanted to share my experience with Limitless Hosting, and also wanted to know suggestions as well as the opinion of the LowEndSpirit community- as well as hear about experiences from other users of Limitless. I also got an account from another web host called MyW.pt hosting, and an account on DigitalOcean (through free credits, so I will probably not have this long-term). I did want to try out different hosts and have test websites running on all.

I got a reseller plan from Limitless Hosting. I figured a reseller plan would be better as it means I can create separate DirectAdmin accounts for separate websites.

So far I have only been doing test projects - so basically I am just testing, the site is not even complete, have not shared the links with anyone (except a few people for testing), but it is live. (This is also the case for MyW.pt and Digital Ocean).

It was working fine for a while. At some point I also put up uptime monitoring tools for all the hosts. My experience has been:

100% uptime for DigitalOcean, never had to contact support
MyW.pt is not 100%, it does go down for like a minute or 2 once a week or so, and once it had a 10 minute downtime. I personally have not noticed the site being down, this is just according to uptime monitoring tool. Their support is OK, not very fast and I think they don't respond on weekends. But I never had a major issue so the early response time was not crucial here, I would hope they would respond faster for true emergency issues.
Limitless has had the lowest uptime among the three, going down for a couple minutes every few days and an extended downtime for like 18 minutes once. It's certainly the worse one among the three. I have also not noticed this myself, again relying on the uptime monitoring tool.

Now, the problem:
I woke up to seeing that there was a about 10 hours downtime that was still ongoing on a site hosted at Limitless. I contacted support through ticket, but they would only respond several hours later. The reply was simply that there was abuse so it is suspended and that I should fix the site. Now this site again is as low traffic as it gets. I went back and forth with the support before it was more than 18 hours when they finally took off the suspension.

I was never informed about the suspension, had to find it out from notification from an uptime monitor. When I asked, I was simply told that there was abuse, and on further questions they said I should improve security of the site.

I should also note that I found myself locked out of the DirectAdmin account on Limitless, I had to manually add the IP to the whitelist. Again, this problem is also not on other hosts, but Limitless apparently just likes to add things to blacklist immediately and just don't care that the clients are affected.

So I think Limitless Host is simply not a good option for any production site - they have bad support who aren't willing to help, bad uptime compared to others, and extreme suspension policy.

I do want to ask the community here what steps I could take here. I assume there was a DDoS attack? Sign up for CloudFlare and have the free DDoS protection from there? What else could be done? I wouldn't want production sites to go down for such an extended period where the hosting provider does not seem concerned to have the site back online. How would I avoid this scenario?

TrK · February 2023

How to avoid this scenario? It's simple choose a reputable host for example the buyvm and sisters or just host everything in your basement with the help of tunnels and such.

Nekki · February 2023

Don’t abuse, don’t get suspend, simplistic.

Ympker · February 2023

It probably can't hurt putting your site behind Cloudflare, albeit the (original) attacker now likely already knows your shared host's ip address.
It's weird that you didn't get any kind of notification about the suspension, though. I realize @Lampard is offering a budget service here, but suspension notice can be even automated. Sure it didn't arrive in your junk/spam folder?

Fwiw, years ago my site was once suspended by Siteground and the support wasn't helpful at all as to telling me why that was. What I'm trying to say is that I get, why a suspension without notice or any kind of information can be frustrating. "Suspended for violating ToS" is just as "helpful" (..not), because while many Le providers keep ToS short and snappy, the bigger players have page long ToS which are not always easy to comprehend (there was some article showcasing some research on how difficult it was to e.g. comprehend TikTok ToS). So yeah, I am very much in favour of hosts who reach out and try to solve the issue together with the client (especially if there's no negative track record).
I also once had an issue many years ago with another host where they wouldn't accept my database for some reason and I remember reaching out to @MikePT who somehow graciously fixed things for me.

As for this case, I am not saying someone is wrong or right. For that there would need to be a statement from Lampard, too. What I am trying to say, though, is that cooperation between client and host in such matters can go a long way.
Of course, I have no guarantee saying this, but I am 99% sure that if my shared hosting with @MikePT would ever cause trouble he'd be right there with me working things out, instead of leaving me alone with the issue at hand. Mike's got a family to feed, he takes the weekends off, and he doesn't reply to tickets 24/7.. he has a life (as should every solopreneur). But when it's important you can count on him

@TrK is also right in so far that if you choose a host charging peanuts (like @Lampard ), usually, the effort put into support is noticeably less than with a host that charges more. That said, I still believe suspensions should be addressed and worked out in a cooperative manner. Fwiw, Site Ground charged way more than Lampard does and was of no help either back then.

Ion3198 · February 2023

@Nekki said:
Don’t abuse, don’t get suspend, simplistic.

It was as low traffic site as it gets. None of the contents of the site was in any violation of any terms of use, I re-read it multiple times. I assume there was a DDoS to the site, they suspended it and then did not bother to inform me and certainly did not want to reinstate the site soon.

@TrK said:
How to avoid this scenario? It's simple choose a reputable host for example the buyvm and sisters or just host everything in your basement with the help of tunnels and such.

I will look into BuyVM. I do want to try out hosting on my own hardware with help from Cloudflare tunnels - but as a hobby, not for production. I got limitless as I thought they were offering a good plan for the price, I don't want to self-host for production.

vyas · February 2023

Hostmantis would have been ideal host for OP. Also Maxkvm

Advin · February 2023

I think the suspension is fine, but they should've told you what it was. I can understand if it was something like a DDoS attack or something critical like bank phishing that required immediate suspension, but I think it's weird that they couldn't tell you.

Perhaps they got a law enforcement complaint if your site potentially got hacked? No idea, but a bit weird.

DirectAdmin's firewall is a little sensitive, it doesn't like to get poked. I wouldn't put the blame on Limitless for that.

angstrom · February 2023

@Ion3198 said: It was as low traffic site as it gets. None of the contents of the site was in any violation of any terms of use, I re-read it multiple times.

What kind of material were/are you hosting?

Unless you were hosting something questionable, I agree that it seems a little odd, almost like a false positive

Hopefully, @Lampard will be able to shed some light on this

Ion3198 · February 2023

@angstrom said:

@Ion3198 said: It was as low traffic site as it gets. None of the contents of the site was in any violation of any terms of use, I re-read it multiple times.

What kind of material were/are you hosting?

Unless you were hosting something questionable, I agree that it seems a little odd, almost like a false positive

It's a website for a local organization - nothing controversial. The website is also not ready (work in progress), and has no content that goes against their terms of service (or terms of service of any web host, really).

@Advin said:
I think the suspension is fine, but they should've told you what it was. I can understand if it was something like a DDoS attack or something critical like bank phishing that required immediate suspension, but I think it's weird that they couldn't tell you.

>

I thought it was downtime and after I opened a ticket they said that it was suspended due to "abuse" and that I should improve the security. It was certainly not bank phishing (there a permanent suspension would be the way to go) or even anything controversial, and extremely low traffic. I think there was a DDoS attack.

Perhaps they got a law enforcement complaint if your site potentially got hacked? No idea, but a bit weird.

I don't think it was hacked. I do use a password manager and have different, complicated passwords on all logins, and they did eventually restore the site. But they did not seem eager at all to have the site restored. If it had been on a production website for a client, then such a long downtime would have been unacceptable.

DirectAdmin's firewall is a little sensitive, it doesn't like to get poked. I wouldn't put the blame on Limitless for that.

MyW.pt hosting that I have is also DirectAdmin, and I never had issues logging in there, so I assumed it might be a Limitless issue.

@Ympker said:
It probably can't hurt putting your site behind Cloudflare, albeit the (original) attacker now likely already knows your shared host's ip address.

I will put it behing Cloudflare. The site has been online and is now working fine, I don't think there's been any more attacks.

It's weird that you didn't get any kind of notification about the suspension, though. I realize @Lampard is offering a budget service here, but suspension notice can be even automated. Sure it didn't arrive in your junk/spam folder?

I could not find the email. I only found it because I had uptime monitor activated.

Fwiw, years ago my site was once suspended by Siteground and the support wasn't helpful at all as to telling me why that was. What I'm trying to say is that I get, why a suspension without notice or any kind of information can be frustrating. "Suspended for violating ToS" is just as "helpful" (..not), because while many Le providers keep ToS short and snappy, the bigger players have page long ToS which are not always easy to comprehend (there was some article showcasing some research on how difficult it was to e.g. comprehend TikTok ToS). So yeah, I am very much in favour of hosts who reach out and try to solve the issue together with the client (especially if there's no negative track record).

Limitless just said that there was "abuse". I assume it means DDoS attack.

I also once had an issue many years ago with another host where they wouldn't accept my database for some reason and I remember reaching out to @MikePT who somehow graciously fixed things for me.

As for this case, I am not saying someone is wrong or right. For that there would need to be a statement from Lampard, too. What I am trying to say, though, is that cooperation between client and host in such matters can go a long way.
Of course, I have no guarantee saying this, but I am 99% sure that if my shared hosting with @MikePT would ever cause trouble he'd be right there with me working things out, instead of leaving me alone with the issue at hand. Mike's got a family to feed, he takes the weekends off, and he doesn't reply to tickets 24/7.. he has a life (as should every solopreneur). But when it's important you can count on him

Currently I don't really have much complain about MyW.pt, except I hope that serious issues (that clients of the website will notice) will be solved even on weekends if necessary. So far I have found the service to be good, and thankfully I have never really needed serious support.

@TrK is also right in so far that if you choose a host charging peanuts (like @Lampard ), usually, the effort put into support is noticeably less than with a host that charges more. That said, I still believe suspensions should be addressed and worked out in a cooperative manner. Fwiw, Site Ground charged way more than Lampard does and was of no help either back then.

Yeah I think I do need to look to other hosts too. Limitless plans seemed really good, with good limits, so I am disappointed that their support has not been good.

angstrom · February 2023

@Ion3198 said: Limitless just said that there was "abuse". I assume it means DDoS attack.

If it were a DDoS attack, a trace of this should show up in the logs. In DA, you should check

Dashboard --> Site Summary / Statistics / Logs --> Usage Log

to see whether there were any sudden spikes in usage

(My guess is that "abuse" doesn't mean a DDoS attack, but this is just a guess)

sonic · February 2023

you get what you pay for

Lampard · February 2023

Hi there!

I see that you had an issue with our hosting service, and I apologize for an inconvenience caused.
Looking into the issue in detail, I see that you have a reseller hosting from us, and a sub-account was suspended due to the reason of "Abuse". The downtime was for only the website which was suspended, not for your whole account as we never suspend whole reseller account unless there's an intentional abuse repeatedly. From past few days, we have been trying to find out the abuser which has been causing high load on our server. We suspended some of the sites that were causing this abuse, and thus found a CPU utilization hike from your domain too at the same time. Please try to understand that we have to take actions immediately to prevent other sites from slowing down, and for reseller sub-accounts, we usually do not inform users on promotional packages which comes with zero tolerance policy, yet we give chance to users to fix their issues and then un-suspend it, just like we did same with your account.

Anyways, you can request for the refund if you are not satisfied with our support or give us a chance to serve you better in future.

Ion3198 · February 2023

@Lampard said:
Hi there!

I see that you had an issue with our hosting service, and I apologize for an inconvenience caused.
Looking into the issue in detail, I see that you have a reseller hosting from us, and a sub-account was suspended due to the reason of "Abuse". The downtime was for only the website which was suspended, not for your whole account as we never suspend whole reseller account unless there's an intentional abuse repeatedly. From past few days, we have been trying to find out the abuser which has been causing high load on our server. We suspended some of the sites that were causing this abuse, and thus found a CPU utilization hike from your domain too at the same time. Please try to understand that we have to take actions immediately to prevent other sites from slowing down, and for reseller sub-accounts, we usually do not inform users on promotional packages which comes with zero tolerance policy,

https://my.limitlesshost.net/plugin/support_manager/knowledgebase/view/4432/web-hosting-web-hosting-resource-limit/1/
Hello! I was hoping for your response.

Here is my question. This is the resources promised on the Limitless website:

For every account created by the Reseller:

100% CPU Fair Usage

5 MB/s IO

1 GB RAM

20 Entry Process

The site was also as low traffic as a site can get, so very low bandwidth usage, way, way less than the maximum allowed under the plan.

At most there were maybe 4 visitors at a single time (the link to the website has never been shared publicly, it doesn't appear in any search as well), so this would go against the "fair usage" model?

So 100% CPU Fair Usage means that one or two visitors at one time will work, but if there's maybe like 4 visitors at one time then site will get suspended due to the "zero tolerance" policy?

Or is it like a lottery? Another user on the same server might have higher traffic at a time and if your site has a slight uptick at that time then any site hosted at Limitless can go down at anytime as you "have to take actions immediately to prevent other sites from slowing down"?

So, to clarify, what you are saying is that even very low traffic sites hosted on Limitless can go down at anytime for extended periods without any notice or any explanation? That any site hosted on Limitless (on a promotional package) is just not okay for actual production use?

yet we give chance to users to fix their issues and then un-suspend it, just like we did same with your account.

I was just told that there was "abuse" and told to fix security. I have made no changes so far, and after many conversations on the tickets later, the site was unsuspended. I specifically asked what I could do on my part but did not receive a clear response, and it was after many many conversations that it got fixed (again, I have made no changes to the website, but I do intend to add Cloudflare to see if it helps.)

Anyways, you can request for the refund if you are not satisfied with our support or give us a chance to serve you better in future.

Honestly I want this to work, I really like the plans. I hope you can provide a good response to my query above as I am quite confused here.

Lampard · February 2023

@Ion3198 said:

@Lampard said:
Hi there!

I see that you had an issue with our hosting service, and I apologize for an inconvenience caused.
Looking into the issue in detail, I see that you have a reseller hosting from us, and a sub-account was suspended due to the reason of "Abuse". The downtime was for only the website which was suspended, not for your whole account as we never suspend whole reseller account unless there's an intentional abuse repeatedly. From past few days, we have been trying to find out the abuser which has been causing high load on our server. We suspended some of the sites that were causing this abuse, and thus found a CPU utilization hike from your domain too at the same time. Please try to understand that we have to take actions immediately to prevent other sites from slowing down, and for reseller sub-accounts, we usually do not inform users on promotional packages which comes with zero tolerance policy,

https://my.limitlesshost.net/plugin/support_manager/knowledgebase/view/4432/web-hosting-web-hosting-resource-limit/1/
Hello! I was hoping for your response.

Here is my question. This is the resources promised on the Limitless website:

For every account created by the Reseller:

100% CPU Fair Usage

5 MB/s IO

1 GB RAM

20 Entry Process

The site was also as low traffic as a site can get, so very low bandwidth usage, way, way less than the maximum allowed under the plan.

At most there were maybe 4 visitors at a single time (the link to the website has never been shared publicly, it doesn't appear in any search as well), so this would go against the "fair usage" model?

So 100% CPU Fair Usage means that one or two visitors at one time will work, but if there's maybe like 4 visitors at one time then site will get suspended due to the "zero tolerance" policy?

Or is it like a lottery? Another user on the same server might have higher traffic at a time and if your site has a slight uptick at that time then any site hosted at Limitless can go down at anytime as you "have to take actions immediately to prevent other sites from slowing down"?

So, to clarify, what you are saying is that even very low traffic sites hosted on Limitless can go down at anytime for extended periods without any notice or any explanation? That any site hosted on Limitless (on a promotional package) is just not okay for actual production use?

yet we give chance to users to fix their issues and then un-suspend it, just like we did same with your account.

I was just told that there was "abuse" and told to fix security. I have made no changes so far, and after many conversations on the tickets later, the site was unsuspended. I specifically asked what I could do on my part but did not receive a clear response, and it was after many many conversations that it got fixed (again, I have made no changes to the website, but I do intend to add Cloudflare to see if it helps.)

Anyways, you can request for the refund if you are not satisfied with our support or give us a chance to serve you better in future.

Honestly I want this to work, I really like the plans. I hope you can provide a good response to my query above as I am quite confused here.

Most of the time, those are the WordPress plugins that can be the culprit, causing sudden hikes in resource usage. Some of the measures which we usually recommend are:

Captcha on forms, such as login pages
Enable caching
Using the latest PHP version
Keeping the themes & plugins up to date
Using a reputed security plugin like WordFence

It is not normal for a website with few visitors to use lot of CPU, as long as website is optimized well, you should not face any kind of issues like that. There are websites that are utilizing more than 60 GB+ bandwidth on same node, but are not suspended because of optimization. Feel free to use full bandwidth assigned to you, there is no restriction with it.

Let's hope you can apply the measures as mentioned above, we will be happy to assist you. Every single customer is important for us.

rcy026 · February 2023

@Ion3198 said:

So 100% CPU Fair Usage means that one or two visitors at one time will work, but if there's maybe like 4 visitors at one time then site will get suspended due to the "zero tolerance" policy?

If 4 visitors causes your site to use 100% cpu, I would seriously consider going trough some optimization and take a good look at what plugins you use.

Seriously, it does not really matter how many visitors you think you had or if you added the website to search engines or whatever, everyone that hosts websites know that they are under constant attacks. Bots and scanners will find a brand new wordpress seconds after you deploy it and start hammer it, and if they find an exploit you are screwed without even knowing it.
Very few providers suspend customers just because they think it is fun to deal with the drama. Trust me, no one does. If they suspended you, there is a reason for it. If it is like you said and you have like 4 visitors on your site, then you are the perfect customer, there is no way they would suspend you for no reason.
I'm not saying it's your fault, it could be a false positive in a monitoring somewhere or whatever, or your site was the problem without you even being aware of it.

I have no experience with this provider so I can not say for sure, but most providers have some kind of monitoring so that you can actually see what kind of resources you use. Try to look at your account and see if something is using a lot of resources, and if so, work with the provider to try and figure out whats causing it.

corbpie · February 2023

Always found it ironic that out of all the providers the one named limitless has the most limits on its shared hosting

vyas · February 2023

@corbpie said:
Always found it ironic that out of all the providers the one named limitless has the most limits on its shared hosting

Their limits are less compared to those offered by other providers

ElonBezos · February 2023

i just hope SG uptime could be better, last week it wasn't so good for me also

@Ion3198 said: Limitless has had the lowest uptime among the three, going down for a couple minutes every few days and an extended downtime for like 18 minutes once.

cybertech · February 2023

@corbpie said:
Always found it ironic that out of all the providers the one named limitless has the most limits on its shared hosting

limitless*

*FUP

corbpie · February 2023

@vyas said:

@corbpie said:
Always found it ironic that out of all the providers the one named limitless has the most limits on its shared hosting

Their limits are less compared to those offered by other providers

Most shared hosting is “unlimited” storage, bandwidth, domains etc these guys actually have low limits set

Fritz · February 2023

It's $6/year for 20GB/200GB reseller plan. Can't complain much.

vyas · February 2023

@ElonBezos said:
i just hope SG uptime could be better, last week it wasn't so good for me also

@Ion3198 said: Limitless has had the lowest uptime among the three, going down for a couple minutes every few days and an extended downtime for like 18 minutes once.

They had a scheduled downtime there last week. Other than that Singapore has been pretty solid for me

Lampard · February 2023

@corbpie said:
Always found it ironic that out of all the providers the one named limitless has the most limits on its shared hosting

I myself agree that there are limits placed on all our packages. Limitless does not mean that we are providing unlimited resources, we have been using that name since our gaming community in 2014. It used to be known as "Limitless RPG" and then it was decided to further expand by going into game servers, hosting services and software. We actually have another site that is known as "Limitless Dev", for providing assets to the game servers.

I have always believed that nothing is unlimited, it is really not an issue for us to make a package with unlimited disk and bandwidth and then later on mention about its fair usage in terms of service. Besides from that, some of the limits we put usually allow us to keep our packages sustainable, we have been consistent with our pricing since 2016, providing hosting from $0.50/month and that never changed because of the limits we put in. Considering those are normal prices, it even gets more affordable when we sometimes offer 90% OFF on it. Hope you can understand.

@ElonBezos said:
i just hope SG uptime could be better, last week it wasn't so good for me also

@Ion3198 said: Limitless has had the lowest uptime among the three, going down for a couple minutes every few days and an extended downtime for like 18 minutes once.

There was a planned maintenance, and we sent the emails too just as @vyas mentioned.

Limitless Hosting - suspending site without any warning, bad support, bad uptime

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