Re: French Car Forum - Hosting Problems
Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 7:11 pm
I've had similar problems with hosting companies in the past.
The first forum I ran for an online game was hosted in the US, reasonably priced, and in two years maybe only one or two outages.
So when I needed to host another forum, I went with them. Big mistake. The service level dropped, I was being fobbed off, loads of outages (basically one customer on the server had a runaway process which would cause the server to restart all websites to prevent itself actually crashing) and they refused to move me to another server. Then the original forum started having problems, I'd handed control of that site to someone else so wasn't my problem, but it was becoming obvious they were hosting too many sites on each server.
I moved the forum to another company in the UK, had 6 months with them being very helpful and no unplanned outages (they'd give plenty of notice of maintenance, and a problem log keeping everyone updated of any issues).
Then they upgraded to PHP5, which screwed the forum up. They were good at helping me fix a lot of the code which was PHP4 specific, but there were database timeouts. The MySQL server was over subscribed and often took too long to respond to page requests.
Again I was fobbed off, something wrong with my code, so I hosted the database on my server at home.
Everyone on the forum reported an increase in response times, the forum was flying! Best of all, no more error messages.
So I informed the hosting company, asked them to increase the php timeout setting, they refused saying the current setting was company policy and they would under no circumstances change it. I discovered I wasn't alone in having problems.
So I moved the web site to my home server and told the hosting company where to shove it.
I'm on O2 broadband so have 1Mbps upstream which is plenty for hosting a website (most hosting companies have 1 or 2 Mbps shared across all their customers).
The first forum I ran for an online game was hosted in the US, reasonably priced, and in two years maybe only one or two outages.
So when I needed to host another forum, I went with them. Big mistake. The service level dropped, I was being fobbed off, loads of outages (basically one customer on the server had a runaway process which would cause the server to restart all websites to prevent itself actually crashing) and they refused to move me to another server. Then the original forum started having problems, I'd handed control of that site to someone else so wasn't my problem, but it was becoming obvious they were hosting too many sites on each server.
I moved the forum to another company in the UK, had 6 months with them being very helpful and no unplanned outages (they'd give plenty of notice of maintenance, and a problem log keeping everyone updated of any issues).
Then they upgraded to PHP5, which screwed the forum up. They were good at helping me fix a lot of the code which was PHP4 specific, but there were database timeouts. The MySQL server was over subscribed and often took too long to respond to page requests.
Again I was fobbed off, something wrong with my code, so I hosted the database on my server at home.
Everyone on the forum reported an increase in response times, the forum was flying! Best of all, no more error messages.
So I informed the hosting company, asked them to increase the php timeout setting, they refused saying the current setting was company policy and they would under no circumstances change it. I discovered I wasn't alone in having problems.
So I moved the web site to my home server and told the hosting company where to shove it.
I'm on O2 broadband so have 1Mbps upstream which is plenty for hosting a website (most hosting companies have 1 or 2 Mbps shared across all their customers).