With the announcement of the iPhone, treoguy’s iPhone website was slammed by hundreds of thousands of curious visitors. Unfortunately, he was on a shared account at HostGator and was using almost 100% of the server’s resources, so HostGator was forced to suspend his account. In the end treoguy decided he probably shouldn’t be hosting such a large traffic site on the cheapest plan at HostGator, so he upgraded to semi-dedicated and is now up and running smoothly.

I wanted to provide some further feedback on a situation I had with my site and with HostGator. I had been with Hostgator for about 5 months or so with their Baby Croc plan. Really, it was a low-cost option and I had zero problems. No downtime or anything. On Tuesday, Apple introduced the iPhone. Well, my site Everything iPhone experienced a massive surge of traffic causing the site to go down. Additionally, every site on the shared server went down. While I don’t agree with the message depicted when a visitor hit the site (contact billing), the company did help me resolve the issue. I spoke with Brent at Hostgator who walked me through what had happened, what’s happening at the moment and what we can do to resolve. In the end, we moved the site to their Pro Dedicated server. Over the course of a few hours, the site went from a Baby Croc shared server to their Pro Dedicated. Later that evening, I was back up and running thanks to the folks at Hostgator. I’m really impressed by the way they stepped up and took care of me. This was a unique case of a site that had roughly 2k unique visitors per day on a good day to getting blasted with traffic.

The site is humming along nicely and it’s much appreciated. My faith in Hostgator has been restored!

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