So, I purchased an hatchling plan with the intention of running a single wordpress installation on it.
Due to the nature of the website (lots of PDF documents), my total file size mushroomed to over 170 meg in just 4 weeks and I was averaging 10gb in monthly traffic.
Then bam! One day, I tried to upload a 1.2 meg PDF and got an “IO error” message in the WordPress media page. Curious, I changed to a broswer upload but then it the server timed out.
To make the long story short, I did the following without success:
- Uninstalled and re-installed Adobe Flash and associated plugins
- Tried using a different browser (after clearing cookies, etc.)
- I tried to upload from a virtual environment (running Ubuntu)\
- I tried uploading images using cpanel and Filezilla
Strange thing was that I was able to upload smaller (~300 kb) file sizes in various formats without any issues. Hostgator kept on blaming my broadband provider (FIOS), so I gave in and spent a couple of hours troubleshooting with a Verizon tech.
No surprise, there was nothing wrong with my connection (speedtest.net results were fine) because I was able to upload the same 1.2 meg PDF to another hosting provider running virtually identical WordPress theme. And there was no speed cap put on my account either.
Another round and going back and forth with HG tech support, and they finally acknowledged that lots of packets were being dropped by their server!
My last tech moved my WordPress database to another server and magically, the problem disappeared.
I guess there really is no free lunch (i.e. unlimited bandwidth and disk space for $10 bucks a month)!