Strict AUP Mean More Profit

"Terms of Service", "Terms & Conditions", "Acceptable Usage Policy" There exists such links on the websites, that many of us might not notice while start hosting wtih many of the hosting companies. In my opinion many of the Hosting companies use such policies to overcome any customer disputes thus giving importance to major business areas like "Prohibitions", "Payment Options", "Hacking and Data Loss", "Spamming and bandwidth Usage", "Suspension and Cancellation","Arbitration" etc. So we can hardly see a few lines for setting technical usage policy in most of the hosting companies. Nowadays hosting companies are gonna nature friendly, becoming part of "Green WebHost" or "Green Datacenter", I will say to meet your hosting needs, the maximum in your present infrastructure can hold before opting for hiring/deploying new ones.

Naturally you can expect a serious question :

"Are you saying to Over crowd our servers? " ,

"Certainly Not".

Over crowding happens when you are hosting domains not in systematic manner. But certainly you can host more in your infrastructure, by selectively designing hosting plans along with strict acceptable usage policy for each, for their hardware and software resource usage. This will help you allocate your hosting, accordingly to resource usage and will allow you to host more accounts in a reliable manner, save money from getting a new hardware.

Are you fully utilizing your server resources?

You may answer "Yes", But unfortunately the fact is "NO". Suppose you are giving two plans, say gold and platinum with unlimited email, database etc but only differ in bandwidth and disk usage. This would end up in all the account utilising the hardware resource to its max, with out any restrictions and will slow down performance when you reach far below the number of accounts that the server can really hold. That's where a strict AUP and associated scripting coming into scene.

How much Technical details should be included in my AUP?

Yea this is truely a useful question for many who are already there and newbies coming for a startup. A good Acceptable Usage Policies are those, which include both the technical and other company specific "terms and conditions" seperately where the technical aspect should touch each and every nook and crany of server performance factor that are shared up by the hosted accounts in the server.

Here i am not emphasising usual "Prohibitions", "unsolicited emails" etc, rather emphasize on incoperating AUP, in each hosting plan you offer.

For accounts in silver plan.

Hosting under Silver plan accounts may not use more than 6% CPU or 6% memory over a 24 hour duration,run more than 15 simultaneous processes or allow any process to run for longer than 30 CPU seconds. Databases are limited to 24 max user connections. Cron jobs should be restricted to use not more than 5minutes. The hosted account should use less than 5,000 inodes and max file size of 1GB.

For accounts in gold plan.

Hosting under gold plan may not use more than 10% CPU daily or 10%memory over 24hour duration. run more than 50 simultaneous processes or allow any process to run for longer than 60 CPU seconds. Databases are limited to 30 max user connections. Cron jobs are restricted to execute not more than 10 minutes.The hosted account should use less than 10,000 inodes and max file size of 2GB.

Eventhough setting a defined resource usuage for hosting plan depends on the server hardware, consulting with guys who are experienced in this. They will setup optimized scripts and services to enforce those rules in your server. This may help you to exploit the under utilized server resources, host more accounts than you expect thereby raise in revenue with out any further investment.