Ok since yesterday I've narrowed down my list of possible web hosts, and now have a couple more questions about policy.

-> Why do many hosts TOS's have a prohibition against "xx% of the monthly traffic being from file downloads"? I anticipate that file downloads will constitute 50%+ of my monthly traffic. Since I either own the copyright or have permission to use all the files on my site, why should hosts care unless I exceed my monthly transfer allowance?

-> Also, I heard some companies will "hijack your domain" if you get on their bad side. Does that mean that the company will try to hack my OpenSRS account and steal my domain? The two comapines that I read about specifically with regard to this were GX host and *****.

Thanks for your time.

Originally posted by Gatta

why should hosts care unless I exceed my monthly transfer allowance?They don't want clients, on the average, to use the full traffic allowance on their accounts. If you consider what bandwidth costs a host, you'll see that the basic price of an account doesn't even cover that, let alone other expenses. But pricing can be what it is because so few clients will come close to using their full allowance. Setting a high allowance and then putting up obstacles to reaching it is a technique some hosts use to make that pricing model work.Does that mean that the company will try to hack my OpenSRS account and steal my domain? Typically no, they won't crack your account. Usually when this sort of thing happens it's because the host registered the account for you and registered themselves as the admin contact.

Hmmm...My free host kicked me off because I was using a huge amount of bandwidth on their servers from file downloads. I run an amateur gmae programming site, so the code samples up for download are kind of integral to the whole site. I don't know what I;m gonna do.

Also, I as an individual am the registrant for the domain, so by your response, I won't have any problems with hijacking?

BTW: JayC, are you the same JayC from GameFAQs?

Most hosts (especially the very low cost hosts) count on most customers using only a mere fraction of their allocated transfer. A few larger accounts use a lot more so it balances out.