I'm looking for some quick advice on this (if you vote in the poll, please try to leave a comment)
I've got a client who went (way) over his bandwidth allocation, and because I'm very flexible I let him use about 30gb of his 20gb allocation about halfway into the month. When the traffic wasn't dying down, I went ahead and suspended his account until the first of next month; and as we have chosen to do - we display incentivizable advertisments on the "suspended account" page with an indidividual tracking link from the referring site; so if someone is to complete these so called "offers", the site owner can have an extra boost of bandwidth added to his allocation. We profit VERY well off these advertisments, and I have no intention of removing them as I think we've done a good job of making them tastefully fit in by hand selecting the creatives.

Heres what the client wants:
He wants his site to redirect to another page until he comes up with the money for a temporary upgrade. While this won't use any of our server resources, I see it as a dissapearing stream of income (his site is still getting 75,000 hits a day and growing)

Any opinions would be greatly valued.

Thanks,
T

You should keep the customer happy, or he will just move on to a cheaper host with more bandwidth.

... I try not to make the clients mad. You could however do a redirect, but have it wait 10-15 seconds to send them on there way, so they still see your ads....

Well, thats not very plausible - I'd have to unsuspend his account, make a new page, delete his old index, replace it with the timer/ad page and make sure I can restore it when he pays. Just so you know, this is extremely bargin hosting - he won't be moving (he paid $20 / year)

1 - make a new reseller, and move him to that resellers account, then change the reseller suspended page. .. if using cpanel

2 - he can still find some crappy host with "unlimited" everything for like $5 year :)

However not even $20 should have been considered "good" .... I feel for both him/and you.

and as we have chosen to do - we display incentivizable advertisments on the "suspended account" page with an indidividual tracking link from the referring site; so if someone is to complete these so called "offers", the site owner can have an extra boost of bandwidth added to his allocation. We profit VERY well off these advertisments, and I have no intention of removing them as I think we've done a good job of making them tastefully fit in by hand selecting the creatives.
I would call this domain hijacking. Suspending an account when it goes over its allocation is fine, misusing the suspension page to generate profit is not.

Heres what the client wants:
He wants his site to redirect to another page until he comes up with the money for a temporary upgrade. While this won't use any of our server resources, I see it as a dissapearing stream of income (his site is still getting 75,000 hits a day and growing)
While nobody can force you to implement the redirect, I would suggest it for two reasons - customer satisfaction and lesser resources, a redirect uses lesser resources than a served suspension page.

Well, the suspension page is teeny-tiny and the creatives are offsite, so it doesn't really use any resources but I agree with the domain hijacking part to an extent - I'm allowing the user (or his/her users) to bring the site back by generating leads, which I think is a good solution - users have been happy with it so far.

SeeServers
"2 - he can still find some crappy host with "unlimited" everything for like $5 year "

He is, well, not a personal friend, but we have done business before and he has no intention of ever discontinuing the service.

The general consencus is that paid hosting will have absolutely no ads.

That's a tough call, you already provided your service and got paid, however, he has no money. I think I'd agree most everyone else that it's best to take down the ads and redirect his site...it could lead to a very loyal customer in the future.