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hosting issues

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update * * *

I think I see what’s going on at Midphase.  They are not taking on any new VPS clients, but are instead directing them to vps.net (which is a cloud system).  In other words, the plan that I signed up for, is not available anymore.  Yikes.  So what does that mean to me.  That sort of explains why they may not have been exactly giving high priority to these VPS outages.  Hmmm… interesting…  You’d think during all these support tickets, someone might’ve mentioned that fact.

On the other hand, this issue has forced me to look at my stats and figure out what sort of resources I’m actually using.

These are averages for a month: 1,552MB going to the site (in) / 15,992MB going out

This sort of info is needed if you are going to switch to one of these new-fangled clouds where you pay by the bytes sent in and out rather than a set price.  That’s what really has changed in the industry since the last time I was looking around for ISPs.  And from what I see, there are a couple of firms that specialize in this cloud technology and that you can go directly to them, or else use a reseller.  I forgot the name of the top providers for this but I have it scribbled down somewhere… rack something…

Disk space used: 5 GB

Now there’s something called a “soft memory limit” and a “hard memory limit” which are terms that the Virtuozzo Container Management Software uses.  The hard limit is set to 1GB.  I believe that’s the actual amount of memory I can use.  And a soft limit of 256MB.  Now I’m in contact with Midphase to find out exactly what that is.  I can see that many times I get warnings that I’m close to or have gone past that “soft memory limit.”  (Fascinating stuff huh.)

I also see that my backups have been going off in the middle of the day, and I’m asking the ISP to move this to the middle of the night.

****

OKAY.  I made some progress.  The soft limit is the amount you get to use, but you can get “burstable” if you run out of memory for up to 10 minutes, if it is available and that’s what the 1GB memory was.  All this time I thought I had 1GB of memory to play with.  However, what they did is bump me up to the next package (for free!) where I’ll have 384KB of soft memory and that may do the trick.  Let’s see how it goes.  At least I’m getting an understanding of what the important terms mean, and how much resources I need for my site.

* * *

Of course I’m now at the point where I’m writing this post backwards… so if you really have nothing better to do…

* * *

I know, I know… this site has been up and down more times than I would’ve thought possible (over the last month).  I’m hosting with Midphase on a VPS server, and every other day the thing goes “unresponsive.”  I would’ve thought that VPS (which is where a number of people have separate containers) on a server would be more reliable than a simple shared server, and that the issues that one person was having wouldn’t effect the others on the server – but so far – all I get is that there was too much load on the server and it has to be rebooted.

I’m very close to switching hosts.  There again, you sort of go crazy as there are a million of them and I’m just sitting here reading customer reviews, and one site that seems to keep getting good reviews is Blurstorm.  I do appreciate that they actually show real-time uptime and load on their servers on the home page.  But who knows.  I hate to switch ISPs because there’s always a bunch of new stuff to learn in terms of managing and setup, and there’s almost always some problem during the switch.

But I do need a reliable host, and although Midphase was reliable when I began with them (maybe a year ago) lately it’s just been nuts.

Basically, it goes something like this.  I get up in the morning.  I can’t see my site.  I try to see if my container is still living.  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  But usually no, and so I open a support ticket with them saying that the server is unresponsive.  Someone from support gets back to me – VERY QUICKLY – saying that sure enough the server is unresponsive and that they are going to do a reboot which will take about 1/2 hour.

And I tell them that this has been going on for a long time and they can look back at my support tickets, or at the log they keep on line, (which is nice) which shows how many times the server has been “unresponsive.”  I look through their entire log and can see that my server has been unresponsive a lot, though they aren’t all that bad, and one is even worse.

I almost always seem to be the one that mentions this to them – and I know they must have some sort of alarm that tells them when the server is not responding.  So I don’t get that at all.

My needs are really pretty simple.  All the hosts say they have 99.7 reliability which is b.s.  But I just need a linux system with mysql, and cpanel and a couple of other things, and something along the lines of PHPAdmin or whatever so that I can deal directly with my SQL databases.

Anyway – (as usual) open to suggestions.

Yours truly,

dismal in new york

p.s. Money is not an issue.  In other words, this is a business – or is supposed to be.  I can pay $100 a month.  I don’t need to get something under $10.  But if I’m paying for something like VPS and all that’s happening is that the server is getting overloaded – then I’ll just do a shared thing.  At this point, whatever works.

This entry was posted by dave on August 28, 2009 at 2:08 pm under black and white photography, techie stuff. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

7 Comments

  1. D. Brent Miller says:

    I have been very happy with Network Solutions. They offer three levels of web hosting plus remote server. Down time is a rare occurrence. CS is very responsive. I am sure others are of similar quality. I went with Network Solutions because they were one of the five original web domain registration sites. They’ve been in the WWW business a long time.

    Brent

    August 28, 2009, 2:19 pm

  2. dave says:

    I think I’m going to give their VPS hosting a try. For one thing, since they already have my various domains registered with them – it should make the switch a little easier. If anyone has a better solution – let me know. But I’m pretty sure I’m going to do the deed this weekend since I’m getting too frustrated to deal with Midphase much longer.

    August 28, 2009, 3:03 pm

  3. Elliott says:

    NetSol is the most uncooperative, unfriendly host you’ll find. Find out for yourself if you must.

    Or spend a little extra money and go with someone with outstanding experience, hardware and reviews: pair.com (especially), mediatemple.net or forest.net

    August 28, 2009, 10:09 pm

  4. dave says:

    thanks elliot… pair.com looks really good… as i say i don’t mind spending extra money if i get good service. maybe i’ll try their vps package… do you recommend pair.com based on personal experience, or friends experience… or reviews…

    it’s tough to make a decision because so far all my choices were made based on what tech friends advised, and so far they’ve mostly been wrong… i think it is because the hosts change as they get larger… but as i say, money is not the issue, i just want someone that is reliable and knows what they’re doing… i don’t need stuff like 1000 mailboxes, or even tons of disk space… but if i’m using a vps server i need to know how much of the ram memory is allocated to me; what the processor is; etc. so we’ll see. even that doesn’t tell me that much since for example midphase says that i have 1gb of ram and i’m constantly running out of memory… and php is set to only use 128mb… so i don’t understand that…

    their prices are the same or less than network solutions. i’ll try and find a few reviews about them

    One customer review complained that they didn’t do well with wordpress hosting and that when traffic got too heavy, they ran into problems.

    Then you read another customer review which says this:
    WordPress on Pair Networks

    “As I wrote earlier, Pair actually recommended using Movable Type instead of WordPress because of the higher server load that a completely dynamic system like WordPress would cause. Like I thought at the time, they were being modest (a good sign). WordPress runs like a dream on their servers, serving pages at double the speed compared to my account at Hosting Zoom. I’ve not encountered a single timeout error in over four months.”

    But just about every customer review I could find said that their reliability was absolutely the best in the business.

    It’s all a tricky business. One review said that with their VPS system you don’t have access to the root of your containers htaccess file. I find that hard to believe because popular caching plugins like Supercache need to write to that file.

    Now on the other hand MediaTemples vps looks perfect, at least on paper. They are a bit more wordpress centric — and have all the programs that I’m used to using preinstalled, and give you root access if you want it. They also seem to have a very straightfoward upgrade path…. right now they are the choice…

    we’ll see what tomorrow brings… i’m looking at their dv Rage package for $100 a month. also, they give you access to all their tech documents without having to log in…

    It really is impossible to figure out who to use… MediaTemple.com for example is frought with bad customer reviews: http://www.jimgoings.com/2008/04/media-temple-kills-my-inner-child/

    A common theme is that they (fill in the ISP) used to be good but they have gone downhill. Customer reviews are difficult to evaluate as they often don’t say anything about how many visits their site gets or even what package they’re using. 10 guys will say they’re great, and another 10 guys will say they are awful.

    This comment is getting so long I should make it a post. But here’s a good (no) thread about NetSolutions:
    http://www.myhostingpicks.com/network-solutions-web-hosting-review/comment-page-1/#comments

    Kind of scary what I’m finding out there.

    * * *
    When I originally chose Midphase, it was because they were recommended by Wordpress.com as a good Wordpress hosting site. Now I notice they’re not on the recommendation page. But still compared to some of the horror stories I’ve read about other so-called great sites – they look pretty good. One site that Wordpress recommends is LaughingSquid.com

    This is a San Francisco based hosting service. Their site is done with wordpress. If you go into the support section for wordpress they’ve answered just about everything you want to know about wordpress hosting. Now they are getting into the new thing of clustered servers, and who are they using — Mosso which specializes in clustered servers, but I’ve also read tons of bad things about their uptime. It’s not supposed to be, but what can I say. Maybe the customer reviews are all written either by employees of the host company or competitors. At any rate, the odd thing about LaughingSquid is that when you switch sites, it’s all based on the domain name, as opposed to the ip number. So you can’t just set up a working site with the IP number and when it’s working switch over your DNS to point at it. You need to start by pointing the domain name to them and go from there. And (at least this is what I read in a review) if you decide to rename the site, you need to rebuild it all again. So that’s not a good thing.

    Wordpress still recommends MediaTemple – which has gotten some of the worst feedback that I’ve ever seen – unless you go back two years when they were really doing well. As I say – all very tricky. One site looked very good until I saw that they charged extra for using mysql. And there are these cloud-cluster-whatever sites that charge based on how much in/out bandwidth you use. When I plugged in some of my numbers based on the current site, I saw it was going to cost over $200 per month. Did you know that Amazon offers webhosting with their clustered servers? I didn’t know it.

    I actually have an account with their backup service which I don’t use much since my upload speeds aren’t fast enough to be useful.

    Let me end this comment before I run out of space… :)

    August 28, 2009, 10:30 pm

  5. JPH says:

    Mr. Beckerman,
    When I had my site up, and when I will have back up again in the future, I used, and will again, without hesitation, use HostExcellence. I honestly never had any real issues with them. When I started using them, they weren’t that old, and that first year, there were infrequent downtimes, that didn’t last long, just little blips… after that, I don’t think I ever noticed or encountered any downtimes, or frankly had any real issues. They are chock full of all the web essentials that you are looking for, wanting, and I think are even out there. Prices are very reasonable… and very excellent customer service, which is why I initially decided to go with them, after having serious issues with my previous hosting provider.

    August 28, 2009, 10:54 pm

  6. Elliott says:

    I had a client company used Pair VPS and they had a perfect experience. In fact, we had used their pairnic.com for domain registration (also a fine experience) but I moved the domains just so there wouldn’t be 1 company controlling all the elements of the domain.

    I know three people who used mediatemple, and one had a TERRIBLE multi-day outage this summer, but it was related specifically to one server and MT definitely screwed that one up. But overall it’s considered to be excellent.

    Digital Forest has been around for 15 years and I’ve never heard anything bad about them. They handle a lot of CMS domains ranging from relatively simple products like Wordpress to heavy-duty packages like Joomla & Web Crossing.

    I don’t know which of these companies might best fit your specific needs but these three companies are among the best.

    The most respected site-forum for reading about hosts — and the place where most reputable hosts themselves hang out — is webhostingtalk.com If you read the archives you’ll learn who’s up, who’s falling apart, who’s got specials (which other hosts tend to match), etc.

    August 29, 2009, 10:21 am

  7. John Cline says:

    Dave this a repeat of the email I sent to you:

    I saw your comment about web hosting. I have been using liwebtech since my site 2002. The guy who runs it, Jim Toro, is very responsive to any problems and the site is hardly down and when it is it is back up within 15 minutes. I just check my web site monitoring site (Web-Stat) and since January 1st, the average daily downtime has been 0.15%. His prices are reasonable, I pay $175/year and I am very happy with his service.
    If they are down more than 1% for any given month, you don’t pay for that month.

    August 29, 2009, 11:35 am