When getting a hosting plan for your blog, it is good to make sure you know all the limits and rules that the hosting company has. Ive been with the same host for over a year but ran into a problem that I was completely unaware of.

My allotted mysql database space was full.

For those that don’t know, Wordpress uses Mysql database to keep up with everything that goes on in your blog. Your comments, blog post, options, stats, and a lot of other info gets stored behind the scenes in your Mysql database. Right now, I have a shared hosting plan, I have about 4 or 5 blogs set up on that plan. Only 2 of those are blogs that I actively maintain, this blog and Jonzee.com. The hosting plan that I have includes an unlimited number of domains and databases. The catch? each database has a limit of 100 mb.

Well a little over 2 weeks ago, I went over that 100mb limit on both blogs. What happened then is every comment or blog post that I tried to make would just yield an error message. Everything was shut down. yea the blogs were still there and visitors can still read everything that I had previously written but I just couldn’t add anything new.

It took me a few days to figure out what was wrong and when I found out it was my database, I called the host to see if they could expand the size. I was thinking, I don’t plan on quitting my blogs, I don’t want to erase what I had already written so expanding my database has to happen. Needless to say, they told me 100mb is my limit and theres nothing they can do.

What do I do now?

Well thanks to a little post I remember reading over at Johncow.com, I decided to transfer my blogs over to a different host, that doesn’t have database size limits. so I spent the last day prepping, backing up, and signing up for a new host. Had a few problems transferring everything over but I finally got the blog back up and running on tophostingcenter.com’s servers. I only got this blog transfered over, still have to do the others but so far things are looking good.

My message to you is make sure you know what you are getting when you sign up for that hosting plan, I truly didn’t foresee this happening.