Time to shop for a new webhost, IMHO. It's a pretty sad state of affairs when hosts lead customers on with promises of unlimited everything for $4.95/month. Can you really get "unlimited hits/transfer" off your account without the host claiming you're using "too much CPU", a metric I might point out the customer has no way to measure and no ability to verify? The claim of "100% use" just rings false.

This sort of shenanigan has become commonplace in the budget webhosting industry, unfortunately. It results from oversold servers. Your website wouldn't be "slowing everyone else down" if they weren't trying to jam thousands of accounts onto a dual-Xeon server (if that).

There are so many ways to charge customers for what they actually use, instead of promising more than can be delivered while penalizing customers whose websites start getting more visits. It is a particularly galling ploy to take sites offline without notice, typically in an effort to arm-twist the customer into a more expensive account. This is not how "upselling" should be done.

Ask yourself, did this "problem" crop up so suddenly as to preclude any effort by the host to warn you about this via e-mail and give you a chance to address the issue without downtime for your site? Or is it their policy to put their customers on the spot by shutting them off first, then waiting to hear from them?

I just think you should have heard about this from your _host_ instead of a site visitor. They have your e-mail address, right? You pay your host to keep your website online, not shut it off without telling you. Yes, there are even hosts who are capable of doing this for a $4.95/month base rate, but they don't claim to offer "unlimited bandwidth".