Annoyed and looking to change

Alan Rowley · 23rd February 2008, 07:13 AM

Hi,

I'm new to this forum and United Hosting, but I have been designing, hosting and reselling websites for several years. I have previously been with Webfusion, 123-reg and am now with Heart. I have a reseller package and I currently host 13 websites.

One of my sites 'the follow on' - "the voice of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire cricket" has a SMF forum with over 800 users, sometimes with over 100 online at any one time. Although I consider that the forum is small, I had connection problems with Webfusion and 123-reg, so I moved to Heart.

Yesterday, and without warning, Heart disabled this website stating ...

The website was disabled for bandwidth overuse with the mysql database.

Now, I'm a pretty easy going sort of chap, but I do object to being cut off without warning, especially as the site wasn't really that busy at the time. The site is cricket related, and it is a lot busier during the summer.

Anyway, I am looking to move the whole lot to another hosting company and I have stumbled across United Hosting. Before I take the plunge, I would like to know if there will be any connection problems or 'bandwidth overuse' issues if I choose United? Will the startup package bandwidth be sufficient for my needs (the other hosted sites I have are not excessively busy)?

canuckster · 23rd February 2008, 05:23 PM

Hi. I'm just a 'regular customer' and don't experience the issues your site does, but I'm pretty sure UH will be able to work something out for you if the required measures aren't already in place (and they probably are). I've had 3 other hosts before trying UH three years ago and now wouldn't dream of going anywhere else -- their service is outstanding, and I've been quite happy with speed and uptime. A quick read-through of other posts here will certainly demonstrate that we UH customers are a pretty content lot.

Good luck with sorting things out, wherever you end up hosting your site.

Vger · 23rd February 2008, 05:31 PM

Only you know your bandwidth usage, so you'd have to choose your package based on your usage where currently hosted.

However, even UH will draw the line at sites which use up too much CPU resource on a shared server.

A forum which can have 100 or more users online at a time isn't small potatoes.

Vger

Terra · 23rd February 2008, 06:17 PM

UH is a very good hosting provider but as any hosting provider they have a duty with shared hosting to provide a good service to ALL sites on a server. If your site is taken up a lion share of the CPU then any hosting provider will have to take action & the only action available is to suspend the site temporarily until a permanent solution can be found.

Discuss your requirements with UH via support ticket - they will give you honest, straight-forward advice. But be open to the possibility of a dedicated server.

UH-Matt · 23rd February 2008, 11:55 PM

Some useful points made here, please contact sales to discuss your exact needs. Did heart give you any sort of measure of usage, or just say it was "too much"?

Alan Rowley · 24th February 2008, 06:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by UH-Matt

Some useful points made here, please contact sales to discuss your exact needs. Did heart give you any sort of measure of usage, or just say it was "too much"?

Heart's exact reply when I asked them to investigate why the site was down was:

The website was disabled for bandwidth overuse with the mysql database. We are monitoring this situation and have enabled your website.

According to my usage figures at the moment, I have 'used 812 MB of your unlimited MB allocation web space' and I 'have used 11385 of unlimited MB data transfer'. I presume that the data transfer is for this month.

At the time of the disabiling, the forum had around 40 users online. The site is local cricket related and can peak at over 100 online during the season. The forum has over 800 members. I don't class that as particularly busy and I have seen much larger forums.

I have a reseller account with 12 other domains, three of which only redirect to another site. Of the other sites, only one is anything like busy, and that is small in comparison to 'the follow on', although it does get busier during the cricket season.

I am still fuming with Heart as they gave me no warning whatsoever that they were going to cut me off. The first I knew of it was a phone call I had from one of the users telling me that the site was down. I think that's an appalling way to treat a customer and if I did that in my business, I would soon be bankrupt.

Anyway Matt, I am looking for a reseller package (can't afford a dedicated server, I'm afraid) with servers that can cope with an average sized forum. On all my sites, I am using about eight SQL databases and I am planning to add another one soon. Effectively, I am splitting the one that has caused the problems, so that it won't have so many users online at one time. Users will be in one, or the other forum.

I have narrowed my search for another host down to three - UH, Dataflame and Clook. I must say that I have yet to find a bad review about UH and this forum is a great place to find out about you. I have moved three times in the last five years, all due to poor service, and I don't want to move again. I have been looking at UH's smallest reseller package, as I think this is sufficient for my needs, though I am open to suggestions.

If I choose to move to UH, is the transfer process relatively painless and will there be a cost involved, apart from the cost of the account, of course?

UH-Matt · 24th February 2008, 06:57 AM

Yes its fairly straight forward to transfer hosts, its best you contact sales to discuss that directly to your situation.

The problem with all these "unlimited" hosts is it leaves the actual limits down to their own interpretation, nothing is unlimited and they simply oversell their servers until problems start to occur and then suspend the accounts that use the most resources. By buying a realistic plan from us you know that its not oversold and you can use 100% of what you buy.

When comparing us to other hosts do take on board some of our genuine advantages - the 4 times daily offsite backups, and mailfoundry spam filtering all included are just 2.

Whatever you decide we certainly wish you all the best, having the plug pulled is never nice and searching for a new host is even worse

Alan Rowley · 24th February 2008, 07:51 AM

Hi Matt,

Thanks for your rapid reply.

If UH can guarantee that I won't be cut off without warning and that you won't oversell your resources, I am quite happy to give Sales a call.

ALAN.

UH-Matt · 24th February 2008, 11:51 PM

Nobody will be able to guarantee not cutting you off without notice, not even us. At the end of the day if your site was using too much resource but not affecting other customers, you would get notice. If all of a sudden your site abused resources to the point that server stability was affected severely then you may be cut off without notice, an engineer will always fix the server issue first (and if a site is specifically causing this, that site will be cut off) before getting a chance to notify and give warning of such a concern.

UH-Matt · 24th February 2008, 11:52 PM

P.S. this is why a lot of mission-critical sites opt for dedicated rather than shared hosting, even if they dont necessarily NEED dedicated, it means they wont ever be cut off or cause a problem for other people sharing a server (or be affected by other peoples sites on the server causing issues).

Alan Rowley · 25th February 2008, 07:16 AM

I'm sure none of my sites will give any problems to a hosting company with servers that can cope with, what is effectively, an average sized forum.

My current hosts disabled my site at a time of low activity. During the busy times, we can have three times the number of users online as there were when we were cut off.

I would love a dedicated server, but they are way out of my price bracket at the moment.

On the subject of databases, my largest one is currently around 110mb, can the UH control panel upload a database of that size without timing out? I cannot use my current hosts control panel to backup my database as it can't cope with the size.

aos101 · 25th February 2008, 03:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alan Rowley

On the subject of databases, my largest one is currently around 110mb, can the UH control panel upload a database of that size without timing out? I cannot use my current hosts control panel to backup my database as it can't cope with the size.

Not sure if that would upload via phpMyAdmin, but that doesn't matter because UH give you SSH access so you can import databases of any size using the command line. The database for the forum on our website is 115MB when dumped to a SQL file, and we can back that up and restore it using SSH fine. You should be able to upload the database dump by FTP/SFTP and restore it using the command line, or if you ask support they could probably restore the database for you.

Alan Rowley · 25th February 2008, 04:37 PM

That's brilliant. Never used SSH or the command line before, but I'm sure there will be plenty of people here to hold my hand.

UH-Tony · 25th February 2008, 08:53 PM

A couple additional comments after having reviewed this thread:

1. "Bandwidth overuse" is most likely a made up reason for the suspension of your site i the first place as MySQL is usually handled within the same server (no bandwidth is then used at all between your forum and it's database) or on an external database(only) server. I have never personally heard of a host setting any limits on the bandwidth between the web and database servers, and certainly cannot imagine that an "*Unlimited*" host would do so.

2. The biggest issue face by an active forum, particularly IVB Forums in my experience, is the number of and resource consumption of the PHP or Perl processes.

With forums, it is usually a good idea to enable as much caching as possible so that threads are served from cache most of the time and only generated from the database the first time they are viewed after a new post is added.

Alan Rowley · 25th February 2008, 10:37 PM

Thanks for your input Tony.

I do not have caching enabled on my forum because the admin section notes state:

SMF supports caching through the use of accelerators. SMF has not been able to detect a compatible accelerator on your server.

The forum was far busier today than when it was disabled - 69 users online at one point, which leads me to believe that what we have is an oversell issue and as my site was probably the busiest on the server, that was the one they disabled.

They said on Friday that they were 'monitoring the situation'. I have heard nothing since. I am still fuming about the way they conduct their business and they won't be having my custom much longer.

spike1207 · 26th February 2008, 03:57 PM

RE: Your large database, there's a script called 'bigdump' I've used a few times in the past to get round PHP upload limits/timeouts.

It's pretty nifty, and has worked perfectly every time I've had to do this, usually when changing hosts or after a server crash.

I've only ever used it to upload PHPBB MySQL DB's, but AFAIK, it will work with any MySQL DB.

Link: BigDump: The Staggered MySQL Dump Importer

Oh, RE: SMF - not all of your settings are stored within the MySQL DB, some are hard coded (by the scripts) into the PHP. Be sure to backup your forum's root folder too.

Alan Rowley · 26th February 2008, 04:17 PM

Thanks Spike. I've heard of BigDump but I've never used it. I'll give it a try if I get stuck.

Charles · 26th February 2008, 05:39 PM

I haven't heard of BigDump. Thanks for the resource. BigDump is also actively maintained too!!

hawk · 27th February 2008, 12:33 PM

A shared server typically has 100 - 200 accounts on it, but that depends on the host. What we pay is actually quite low so often times hosts will terminate any account that has an impact on other people. If your forum is causing problems for others then it is right the host removes it immediately. What your host has done is perfectly acceptable behaviour. Many people on shared hosting account have absolutely no regard for their neighbours and that simply causes the host to get a bad reputation for high server loads, slow sluggish servers and such like.

My previous host who is one of the best in the world with exceptional reviews is on the verge of banning resource hogging crap like Joomla, Drupal and WikiMedia and rightly so.

100 active users on a forum at anyone time is not a small forum. Unfortunately many people fail to understand what shared hosting is all about and the nightmares is produces. Newer apps are gobbling up resources like there is no tomorrow causing mayhem for many people.

The above comments are my observations over many years and not related in any way to my experience here.

Alan Rowley · 27th February 2008, 08:14 PM

I accept what you say, hawk, and I respect your opinions, but what really pee-d me off was the fact that they disabled the site without notice, or consultation. On top of this, they did it at a time when the forum wasn't really that busy.

I wouldn't say I have 'no regard for my neighbours' and I do understand what shared hosting is all about. My bandwidth usage for February is a little over 13gb, which compared to some sites is small fry.

I have come to the conclusion that my hosting company are overselling and have little regard for their customers.