Need Suggestions for Hosting Companies!
1 10 2007
I currently have many of my websites hosted on Media Temple’s Gridserver. If you click on the link, don’t get sucked into their slick marketing and hyped up “Grid Hosting” talk. Today my sites on those servers have been dead slow to respond all day long. About 15 websites. Since moving them to the gridservers they have also been plagued with database errors, even after upgrading to “dedicated” memory for my db’s (Grid Containers). I’m now spending a around $80 / month for two accounts, and I don’t feel safe keeping my sites there much longer. I lose money every time something like this happens, and it never fails, that it happens at the worst possible time (like the day you spent a bunch of time and money doing extra marketing to get people to your website).
My problems actually started with a company called Aplus.net, where I had hosted many static html sites over the years. Aplus.net had the worst outsourced tech support you could imagine. Not that I need tech support very often, but their control panel had bugs, so it was painfully necessary to call them sometimes. When I started bulding more database driven sites, I noticed 500 errors on Aplus.net hosted sites. When I called, I was told that their servers “do not allow more than two simultaneous PHP processes at a time,” whatever that means…. I was running a simple serendipity blog that they had available in their control panel.
This is when it really got bad.
My spearfishing forums were on Aplus.net’s shared hosting, and I knew it was an accident waiting to happen. I had already set up the hosting account on Media Temple and begun moving my smaller websites there. The forums weren’t getting any traffic though, and the site would be hard to move so I saved it for last. That’s when the biggest spearfishing forum site on the web went down. The owner shut it down, purged a bunch of moderators, and basically pissed off a bunch of users. So where’d they come? My site, and you can probably guess what happened next. My site was crippled by the traffic. The aplus.net servers couldn’t handle it after the first few hundred visitors. I had to shut down the site and spend the next 24 hours moving it to Media Temple.
During the interim, some of the guys local to the spearfishing community on the big site, set up their own barebones vbulletin forums, on a decent server, and all of the traffic went there. It stayed there too of course.
Do you see why hosting is important? Suppose the same thing had happened to me today? No one’s going to stay on a site that takes 5 minutes to serve a web page.
I inquired into Rackspace dedicated hosting, and the cost will be over $500 for what I need (a little too steep). I also tried out Mosso, who is rackspace’s shared hosting sister company. They looked really promising at the $100 / mo. price. The services they offered seemed really cutting edge. But when I started moving sites there, I had trouble with their database servers lagging. They acted like it was a very rare occurrence, but how should I know? I need something reliable. I cancelled that account too.
So here I am, still frustated with hosting, looking for suggestions. If anyone has any I’m open to them. The thing is, I need to host a bunch of database driven websites, which I’ve found out – is a lot different from hosting a bunch of static html websites.
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Day 2: the saga continues:
http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/web-and-email-latency-on-gs02-grid-service-cluster-2/
I too ran into the mt troubles! I moved their in August after doing a bit of research and speaking with their support who does a great job at marketing! They sold me, so I moved three sites over there, all of which are database driven. And as you found as well, it was… let the games begin! The first was my final snapping point. I have since pulled all of my sites back off of mt, which is a huge pain in and of itself, and moved back to my shared hosting accounts on hostgator.com. I have been with them for quite some time, but they also have some speed issues when traffic gets extremely heavy. I will be testing their private hosting now and report back, but I will also check back here to see what you may have found.
Good Luck!
I am now looking at dedicated servers on LiquidWeb and a few others. Good luck to you too.
Oh, webhostingtalk.com seems to be a good resource too.
Here we go, for $210 / mo., I hope this works out:
Processor: Intel E4500 DUAL CORE
Memory: 2GB DDR SDRAM
Hd1: 160GB 7200RPM SATA / 8MB Cache
Hd2: 160GB 7200RPM SATA / 8MB Cache
RemoteBackup: 50GB Remote Backup
(+Offsite Backup)
OS: Linux – CentOS 4
ControlPanel: CPanel / Web Host Manager
(+ServerSecure)
(+Fantastico/XController)
I’ve also set up managed DNS, so that I will be able to host backup copies of my important websites elsewhere, and switch to them instantly in case of a failure. I’m excited about the prospect of not having to worry about what my hosting provider will do next!!!
who did you end up going with? Is that liquid web?
Yeah, LiquidWeb. I read a lot of good reviews about their support, and that’s one of the main things that sold me.
FYI – mt is giving a 1 month credit for the issues. If you didn’t have a ticket open, just open a new one asking for the credit. They gave me mine right away. Unfortunately it is just a credit (not a refund) and I’m moving my sites off anyway, but now I have more time to settle everything down and that time will be free.
Yeah, I got that on one of my accounts – just requested it for the other. Who are you going with?
Update:
I have begun moving my sites to the new server on LiquidWeb. Their dedicated hosting support has been incredible so far.
As for Media Temple, my site monitors have been sporadically going off for the last two days now. Usually brief outages lasting 3 minutes, but there was one last night for 37 minutes. Media Temple keeps saying they have fixed the problem, but that’s simply not the case.
More news (DOWNTIME) from Media Temple:
http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/2007/10/11/maintenance-scheduled-thu-oct-11/
Have you moved your sites over to liquid web yet?
Yes, their dedicated server support is the best I’ve ever experienced. The server is ultra fast too. I think this is going to be a good solution.
FYI – when I posted that previous comment your sites load times were over a minute. This was why I asked. I may have just been a routing issue or something though. Maybe I was still getting pointed to (mt).
Sorry I wasn’t very spcific in my last response. It depends on which sites you were looking at. I have a few that are still on Media Temple, and yes, their load times are still slow sometimes. One was down for almost 45 minutes last night. I have site monitors that let me know when latency or downtime occurrs. So far, the LW server hasn’t had a problem.
As of now, The FMC Directory and Talk About Marriage are on LW. I haven’t gotten any latency reports on those since the move. World Spearfishing Guide and a few other small sites are still on one of my MT accounts, and I’m in the process of moving them still.
oops, just realized this one’s still on Media Temple too :(
[...] My interest in dedicated severs and the market began back in the Fall of 2007 when I was looking for suggestions for a new hosting company. If you follow my blog, you know I did my homework and ended up with my current dedicated server at [...]