We do not place arbitrary limits on your account. But the universe is not as boundless as we are, and thus imposes its own limitations.

There are three kinds of limitations you, we, and everybody else, should be aware of: hard limits, soft limits, and pragmatic limits.

We host your websites on cloud servers provided by cutting-edge third-party server providers, including Vultr, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Google (GCP), Amazon (AWS), and others. We use high quality providers and choose a constellation of features that will be far more than adequate for most small businesses. It usually takes quite a while before a new website hits any of these limits.

Hard Limits

Hard limits cannot be exceeded. Disk space and memory are common examples. When your hard disk runs out of disk space, you can’t store more files on it no matter how hard you try. You’ll have to clean up the disk or add storage.

We monitor a number of hard limits (such as disk space and CPU usage) and notify you if we see your website nearing its capacity. Usually, a little cleanup will be sufficient, but we also offer additional solutions, including offloading media content to a specialized CDN, or upgrading the hardware.

Soft Limits

Soft limits indicate that you might need to upgrade your hardware or service. For example, a service that limits the bandwidth typically sends notices or charges overage when the limit is met, and usually only curtails the service if the limit is significantly or repeatedly exceeded. More often than not, soft limits are imposed by software and people.

We don’t impose soft limits but the server providers do. Every server provider has different limitations, so we do our best to balance their strengths and weaknesses against your needs. We list these limitations for you and let you know if we’re notified of any excessive usage.

For fixed-rate cloud VPS hosting, we work with you on figuring out the next steps when that happens. Websites hosted on scalable cloud infrastructure subscribe to pay-as-you-go pricing, so your monthly bill will be affected by higher usage.

Pragmatic Limits

Pragmatic limits are more subtle than hard or soft limits. Hosting requires carefully balancing many factors, including physical hardware limitations and economic constraints, and are effectively limited by the law of diminishing returns. So performance, usability, search rankings, and other metrics can suffer even before any hard or soft limits are reached. For example, a website that can easily handle 10,000 visitors a month may not do so well with 100,000, even if no limits are placed on the number of users.

We monitor the websites we host for uptime, SEO, security, performance, and other factors. We monitor different factors on different schedules (i.e., constantly, weekly, monthly, upon request, or even ad-hoc). One of the issues we look for when we analyze all of these factors is degradation of service.

For example, if your website ranks lower on Google suddenly, that could indicate that your website has slowed down. There could be many reasons, such as a spike in the number of visitors (a good thing, with possible performance implications), or perhaps because your disk is running out of space (a bad thing, also with possible performance implications). When we encounter these issues, we do our best to resolve them. If we feel a pragmatic limit has been reached, we’ll let you know, and then you’ll have to decide whether to leave things as they are or to choose from any of the solutions we might offer.