I'm afraid is it more "normal" than not. Web hosting companies and ISPs can (more often than not) do whatever they want. What recourse do you have? Yes you can complain .. to them .. or to .. WHO? The goverment? Yeah, *that's* gonna work. (if it does work it'll take years)

do what john said & read the fine print. Odds are they can do whatever they need to to keep everyone "fair". If your videos are taking up 90% of their bandwidth, even though it could be a lot less then what you THOUGHT you bought, it could be more then they actually offer.

I can recommend a company that gives exactly what they say, no fine print.

You could place some of them on a site like YouTube or Vimeo. On Vimeo they have to be created by you and not used solely to sell a product. With a Plus account you have a lot of control over how the video is played and where.

I highly recommend using Amazon Cloudfront to host video files. They have super fast servers all over the world so your video downloads fast everywhere and I've found the prices very reasonable. You pay for what you use. My regular web host is very reliable but gives tiny bandwidth, but that doesn't matter now that all the big media is served from Amazon.

Cloudfront is a bit involved to set up. I use the excellent and free Cloudberry to do the uploading and manage things, and I set up a CNAME with my host to make the URLs nicer (http://cdn.bubblevision.com).

I paid a premium for unlimited bandwith and unlimited space. The fine print does say "normal usage", but that is relative. If my files created problems for them then I am much better than I am charging clients. Seems like a good problem to have. In all reality, it seems that they have over sold/populated their servers.

This is not good customer service. If the host had an issue with space/bandwidth one would have expected them to communicate with you first before deleting things.

This is not good customer service. If the host had an issue with space/bandwidth one would have expected them to communicate with you first before deleting things.

Only slightly better. The "communication" could simply be "You are using too much space. Remove some files or we will do it for you."

That does not help the situation. You don't know how many files to delete. (because they seldom tell you how many files/space is too much, and how many are OK) You very well could delete a third of your files .. but they could delete more.

I would follow John's suggests. But the web host is really in no-no land if you have no porn, child pics of questionable taste.....etc...

The odds are they suffer a hardware failure in the storage unit and the backup probably wasn't complete or properly done. Or they are subleasing their disk space from another bigger provider and reselling it ( this done a lot). They may exceeded the agreed disk space for all their accounts and was forced to reduce to alloted volume. you were probably at top. In this case, they probably rented 500gs, but resold 20gs to 100 clients = 2000g space thinking the average user would use 4g each (averaged( or the total actual use space by all would not exceed 500g, should user demands exceed 500g, they would rent the next cost effect size, but till then they would made profit by renting the smaller unit. But now, Their provider may want new fees and they can't agree, so they start reducing actual storage, its wrong but it happens.

I assure everyone that there were no questionable things on my website. The closest thing I had to porn was "Bras for the Cause" :)
Videotaped people stringing bras together for 2 & 1/2 miles for cancer awareness. The company Did send me an email Thu 4/8/2010 5:33 AM and the files were deleted ...Stewart Davis: We deleted the files on April 08, 2010 at 6:53 AM. Due to the hour difference, I was given 5:33 until 5:53 to answer the email. I was sleeping. Thank you for your thoughts, I just wanted to know if I should pursue this further or just drop it, and find a better host.

vote with your "feet". Get a better host. No notice shows they don't really care.

It is because of a practice called overselling. They advertise more hard drive space / bandwidth / etc. than what they are really willing to provide. Because if all of their clients used as much space and bandwidth as you do, the web host would be losing a lot of money.

Most people use very, very little disk space and bandwidth so they don't run into overselling. A normal text+graphics website might use 500kB of bandwidth a visit. Compare that with 50MB in video per visit... that's 100X the disk space, bandwidth, etc.

2- Demand a refund? If you have a credit card, demand a refund and file a chargeback if they don't give it to you.

Out of curiosity, what hosting company was it?

If your domain and host are the same company you might have a fight on your hands to move to another hosting company. When you do, if you keep doing the same thing the new host company might zap you as well. As stated, it is a common practice. If this is a source of income consider upgrading and paying more for your site each year or off load the bandwidth through YouTube/Vimeo/Amazon as suggested.
For every hosting company someone suggests, another person says stay away. As Glenn and others stated it is a common practice.

Unless you find a host that guaranties the numbers they advertise. Those normally have lower space/bandwidth, but then you at least know when you'll run out.

I don't want to start a flaming war on a professional video site. I thought that it was a little strange that the hosting company suggested that I use youtube for all my videos. I think that if I am selling my wares, I should have enough professionalism to host the videos on my site, No disrespect to those that use them, you don't see MSN, or Pixel Pops use external sites. Oops, now I have to tell you it was Globat.com

I just transferred off of Globat 6 months ago, pretty painless. Followed the steps on the new site to transfer everything, got the transfer codes electronically, verified things electronically. Deleted the credit card info off of the old site. They did try to charge for the next year via phone, but we explained our reasons for switching.

Are you using shared hosting or a dedicated server. If dedicated, you should immediately change hosts as you are paying for the privilege of doing pretty much whatever you want. Their behavior is pretty poor even for shared hosting. Depending on your volume of business, it might be worthwhile to get a dedicated server...or operate your own server from your business.

I've been trying hostgator.com, they're terrific for a host. Great idea from earlier poster though re the amazon.com streaming service is the best way to host video-heavy sites from what I've seen; I need to migrate all my videos there too, as they can stream it faster than any shared/dedicated server host would anyways.

-k

"If your domain and host are the same company you might have a fight on your hands to move to another hosting company."

Bullpucky. If you are the "Administrative Contact" on the domain registry, then the hosting company cannot stop you from moving your site.

If you are *NOT* the "Administrative Contact", then you do not own the domain name.

"The company Did send me an email Thu 4/8/2010 5:33 AM and the files were deleted..."

Did they say *why* ??

They said I had an abnormal amount of video files on my site. "those video files were created by me" Here's the copy and paste.... "Hosting space ... is limited to Web files, e-mail and
content of the hosted Web sites, not for storage of media
and other data. Hosting space may not be used as offsite
storage for electronic files or for third party electronic
mail or FTP hosts."


****************************************************************
You need to remove the files in violation IMMEDIATELY to avoid having them deleted.
****************************************************************

If you are using your Web hosting account as a repository for storing music, movies, videos or pictures of any kind, your account is in violation of our Terms of Service. Please understand that we're not making any statement as to the legality of the files; this type of file storage is simply not what our hosting accounts are intended for.

For more information, please review the "Bandwidth and Disk Usage" section of our Terms of Service:
http://www.globat.com/legal/legal_useragreement.bml

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. We certainly do not want to lose you as a customer, but we must consider the needs of all customers on our shared hosting platform. Our Terms of Service are in place to ensure the optimum performance of all accounts on our platform.

Please contact us if you have any questions:
http://www.globat.com/support/contact.bml

Sincerely,
The Globat Team

My response was these were proof files (for clients to proof their project: and/or demo files for my work to be displayed so they are part of the website.

It would seem that if you had a link to all of your videos from a web page like a "download here" or stream the files, they would be considered part of your site content, not an offline storage area.

You would probably waste your time arguing that point though. I would just find another provider that has better service.