"When you were hosting with Site5 did you have access to an admin page indicating your usage stats?"
For things like memory usage and CPU time? No. Not unless they added something ot track that, and frankly I'd be astounded if they did. Their custom backend is built off of cpanel. bandwidth and disk space, yeah I could see that.
They are a shared host, and the bandwidth & hard drive space in inordinately huge amounts are offered because they know you will never ever use them. It is a common practise.
I see they've moved their policy again to here:
http://www.site5.com/support/rup.php
I like this part:
"If, however, you start to affect the overall performance of a server, we do need to have limits and policies in place. Without them it's incredibly hard to explain to the customer, in quantitative terms, exactly how a site is consuming too many system resources."
No, actually, it's not all that hard.
Also note these limitations:
Processes
* Consume more than 16 MB of RAM.
* Utilize in excess of 15 seconds of CPU time.
* Number of open files should not exceed 64.
* Number of simultaneous processes should not exceed 5.
Database Restrictions
* All users are restricted to 15 concurrent MySQL connections.
* Each database is restricted to 2 GB of disk space.
* Database queries should not exceed 3,000 per hour.
* Database changes (insert/update/delete) should not exceed 1,000 queries per hour.
*If* your MU installs stay under, say 100 blogs, and each one is in a seperate account, and you're light on comments & activity, then maybe you'll be fine. I can't recall you saying how big of a site you'd wind up with. The thing to remember with a dynamic application is that every time someone visits, it's making db connections.
I will say we did try to resolve usage issues, but they were not very helpful, mostly saying it was my job to find out what in MU was eating resources. We were being pounded by spam, so DUH. They did not at that time have a policy (that I know of) to bump me to a higher account, nor did they state I had that option. I was on a multi-site plan, having upgraded from a previous plan, and they restructured their packages, so it was considered "legacy". I did not want to be tied in for a year or more. They do state that a Diamond account has 4x the cpu resources and ram than a Silver account, but they don't actually state what that is. They also keep changing their plans around, so it's hard to tell aside from the bandwdith and space. When I was there, they had an unadvertised "bug" in the system leaving some account with unlimited (unmonitored) bandwidth.
Also, the db was so big, I could not back it up in one go, I had to do it in zipped chunks so I'm quite sure it was close to the db limit as well. (I should state that I had planned to move off them sooner, but on top of the house move, I'd been in the hospital twice for surgery, so plans got delayed.)
An MU install with 250 blogs (ballpark, say 20% of them active) will eat up 256 RAM in no time flat. With a serious install of MU, a shared host is just not recommended. At the end of the day, while I was testy in being shut down on the one day where it was most inconvenient to me (I was moving and the moving van had showed up on the same day the site went down and the internet was to be cancelled the next day), I understood their point. I would say the same about *any* shared host.
And if I were doing this for a business? No way I'd put it on shared. Not enough control.
Right now, my install has around 400 blogs, a large percentage of used ones, a over a million hits a month. I'm on a VPS and I had to upgrade my ram from 512 and add 128 to it. I am using less than 15% of the hard drive space I have allocated to me and less than 5% of the bandwidth. About once a month I *still* hit some major CPU usage, but at least I can go in myself and tweak Apache settings. I've also split it off into 16 dbs for better manageablilty. When you start getting up there, you have to be on top of the db pretty much every day, optomizing and backing up.
The other thing I noticed is that when I was there, I could pay 3 months at a time (it was $20-25), now they have it monthly or yearly. Most of the prices have stayed the same, but they're now asking for longer contracts.
So in the end, my opinion is from a professional standpoint, not as a begrudged user. I have sent people to the same company, but they had one single blog, or a handfull of seperate installs, or a message board.