Issues with a new free account, thinking to move from X10

[sheikh_aman]

I have been a happy user of X10 hosting for more than 2 years now, and since the site that I hosted was for my personal uses, I opted for a free hosting account and never had any problems with it.

I am bootstrapping a tech startup now, and going with the amazing services that I had availed with my free account, I opted for a free account for my startup too, which is hosted at the "lotus" server.
I had plans that once we raise enough money to sustain ourselves, we would go for a paid account. But the continuous issues that I am having with the account are forcing me to think again.
Currently, the FTP account keeps getting disconnected citing the reasons "too many users logged in".
We'll be using the hosting heavily during our website's development and since we work from geographically diverse locations, its more crucial.
FTP is something very important for us and I can't imagine us using it if it is inconsistent.

We also had plans to host our CVS system like Git on another hosting from X10, but I am giving another thought to this as well.

Can you please let me know what's wrong with this stuff?

 

[essellar]

If you're trying to run a business from your site and are in a country listed as "risky" (neither blacklisted nor whitelisted in the countries list), then Free Hosting is probably not the best option. Lotus has a lot of users, so FTP collisions are far more likely than on other servers, and there is a higher probability of running into problems caused by other abusive accounts on the server.

It wouldn't be unfair to say, though, that trying to run a business from any free hosting account is not the best decision you can make. I understand bootstrapping and the seemingly constant haemorrhage of money that entails, but relying on free hosting accounts (anybody's, not just x10Hosting's) is putting too much at risk. Because there is no legal consideration on your part as an account holder, there are no legally-binding agreements in place concerning things like uptime (or, for that matter, the continuing existence of your account). While the good people here aren't trying to work an angle, there is a limit to the resources they can apply to free hosting accounts -- and the first-level support is just fellow users like myself, so getting problems looked after in a timely fashion can be a bit hit-and-miss sometimes.

I'd look at one of the paid plans if it were me. Even the Illuminated level (at $US 60 for five years) is a considerable step up if Premium hosting (which is very affordable at the basic level) is out of your budget range: you get an account on a server with considerably fewer roommates to squabble with, along with greater resources (more databases, more email and FTP accounts, greater file sizes, a larger memory allocation, etc.). More importantly, you then have a contract that includes a two-nines SLA, which means that you can reasonably rely on it. No SLA, and you're just dealing with hope, optimism and a reliance on the better side of human nature.