As a courtesy, we don’t switch off your website or email the moment you reach a limit. You’ll get a warning and time to sort it out.
Each hosting package has limits, such as disk space, email storage, databases or bandwidth, shown on our website. Here’s what happens if you go over them.
Step by step
- We’ll let you know. We’ll email you if your usage goes over your plan’s limits, and suggest ways to free up space or a plan that fits better.
- You have 14 days to sort it. You can free up space, or upgrade from the client area. We’ll send a reminder after 7 days.
- If we don’t hear from you within 14 days and you’re still over the limit, what happens next depends on whether you’re a business or a consumer (see below).
| What happens after 14 days | |
|---|---|
| Business customers | We’ll upgrade you to the next plan that fits your usage, and charge the pro-rata difference for the rest of your billing period to your stored payment method. We’ll email you to confirm, and you can move back to a smaller plan later once your usage fits. |
| Consumers | We won’t upgrade you or charge you without your agreement. We’ll contact you again to agree the next step. |
If it can’t be resolved
If we can’t take payment for an upgrade, or you stay over the limit without agreeing a way forward, we may suspend the service after giving you notice by email. We’ll restore it as soon as you contact us to free up space, upgrade or pay.
While a service is suspended:
- your data is kept safe until you contact us
- the service isn’t cancelled, so it will renew and be invoiced as normal (to stop it renewing, cancel it)
- fees aren’t refunded for the suspended time, because your account, data and backups are still held on our servers
- if it stays suspended for 30 days and we haven’t heard from you, we may end it after a final email, and your data will then be deleted
If excess usage is affecting our platform or other customers – for example a full disk on a shared server – we may need to act sooner. We’ll always tell you what we’ve done and why.
Easy ways to stay within your limits
- Don’t keep backups on your hosting. Download backup files and store them elsewhere. Backup files you create in your control panel may be deleted after 7 days anyway.
- Clear out old email, especially large attachments.
- Don’t use hosting as a file store. Everyday website files are absolutely fine, but large downloads such as .iso disk images, installers or big media collections are better on a cloud storage or content delivery service. We’re happy to help you move them.
The full wording is in clauses 6.5, 8.6 and 10.4 of our Terms of Service.
Not sure why you’re over, or which plan would fit? Please contact our support team – we’re glad to take a look.
