Before you sign up with any web host you need to take a very close look at the TOS; this is short for “Terms of service”. The TOS should not be overlooked, a lot of hosting customers simply check the “I agree” box and continue without even reading the terms, and this can cause a lot of headaches in the long run.

TOS aren’t your typical user agreement that you will see when installing software applications. Hosting TOS contain very important information about what you can, and can’t do with your new web hosting account.

Some hosts may have a really good deal, great price, great disk space and bandwidth but if you look closely at the TOS you may find little get out clauses such as:

"Any customer using more than x% of system resources will have their hosting account terminated”

So even though the host is offering you a massive amount of disk space and bandwidth, if you get anywhere close to the limit you will often find that your account has been suspended. Why has it been suspended?

Because you broke the Terms Of Service!!

This is just one example of how not reading through the TOS can come back and bite you in the butt, there are many other policies that some hosts will include in the TOS. These include CPU usage limits, not being allowed to host downloadable files (.zip, .mp3, .pdf) and so on.