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I'm using two different host providers .. Blacksun.ca definately dedicated hosting, but I'm also using a "pro" Reseller Account at Ace-Host.net .. As far as I believe .. it's not shared, except among myself and my sites. Even then, I set quite finite packages of bandwidth, space, etc and there is no sharing. I wish it was all under a blanket space and bandwidth package. My renewal comes up this 28th and I'm extending it for a year in advance though .. I've been month to month since January testing them out.
Dreamhost is good as long as you don't plan on running a massive dynamic site like wordpress where it starts to crash the database that they cram with customers
I know I'm going to need my own operation at some time, but I want to set my experiences alongside yours. Maybe they learned from your case. It happens. :-)
I think today's hosting scenario frankly sucks. The dot com boom is as strong as ever and unfortunately a good marketeer should take advantage of this and give top class hosting with good servers.
But sadly :(((/ I think 2 very reliable hosts I've seen are http://lunarpages.com and http://elixant.com.
Dreamhost has too many websites on teh same box. The above hosts are rich in bandwidth and their servers are blazing.
My crime? Having a popular website. And by popular I mean that it has 3000 visitors a day. Not exactly a major player. I'd put my web address on here, but I don't think these guys are above being petty, so I'm going to make sure I have my site moved before I get vocal.
I will definitely be contacting Liquid Web. Thank you!
I noticed this post in a Google search of course. :)
My name is Kayla, from Surpass Hosting. The owner of that site (DJ Slim) actually now has a private server with us and understands how the site created such a problem on the shared server it previously resided on. It was the final night of American Idol afterall and why it happened is completely understandable. The surge in activity happened 24 hours previous to that night and it was obvious that it would be difficult to keep the site up. I monitored that site throughout the next night and even unsuspended it a few times to see if it was possible to allow back online - and it wasn't. The server started to crash within minutes. The site was basically overtaking the machine. Had the site been in a private environment without the processes of other users contributing to the overall load, yes it would have been fine.
It is to my understanding that visitors to the site started a rumor that we were not releasing a backup? We began to get threats that we "suck" and the like. At no point did the owner treat us in this way. DJ Slim was cooperating with us and we worked out the issue, it was actually a pleasant and polite experience. That very short sentence he was quoted on was misunderstood by many people. In no way was the site being "held hostage," it was just temporarily suspended because even if it had been active- the server would have been rendered useless due to all of the activity, so the site wouldn't have been online at any rate. It's a simple fact that not every site can remain in a shared enviroment forever. :) Sites grow and evolve.
Thank you for reading. Hope you don't mind that I posted here but you did say that we suck.. and I really don't think it's true. =)
Regards,
Kayla
Max
I can only say follow the link to Problogger and read the interview with this guy, it was pretty clear what you guys did. That you've since worked with him is a positive, however you didn't initially, you just cut him off, and this is poor form.
Nova,
happy to know I wasn't alone on this one. Site5 are a disgrace, the worst thing for me is that I made the mistake of recommending them at the time (when things were going well)...indeed, I actually for memory referred some decent business there way as well, and yet the shared hosting curse struck again...and I guess at the end of the day, although it's happened to me time and time again, I'm the most bitter about Site5, because Site5 promised so much more, so the expectations were so much higher, therefore the crash even bigger.
Dreamhost is better because they have stats on individual CPU usage and they will work with the customer to solve their utilization issues. They also keep the database servers separate from the web servers which helps isolate problems, and means your static pages won't go down just because someone is running 1000 queries per page on your server.
All that said: shared hosting is rough. Given the proliferation of blog packages, plugins, and tons of inefficient open source code that anyone can install and run, it's remarkably easy for one person to bring down a shared host. When told they are using too many resources, they get mad because they think it's the hosts problem. But the host can't be your private programmer. If you host static files you can absolutely hit these huge bandwidth limits, so it's just about efficiency. That's why MovableType is a better option than WordPress or even TextPattern for popular blogs. The best you can do with a shared host is get one with the technical chops to properly monitor usage and deal with problems efficiently. Right now I think Dreamhost and TextDrive have the best technical skills. However, if you are hosting serious websites then it's probably worth looking into dedicated or VPS solutions.
{}'s
"1 million minutes of free video streaming at 700 Kbps per site per month. Unlimited streaming will also be available for free with advertising, or with payment of a nominal fee for the service for use without advertising."
Unless I'm reading this wrong it's 420 GB of free traffic w/o paying a penny and w/o advertising. That's for video only. There doesn't seem to be a hard restriction on tiny content such as images. Actually it could be 4.2TB - I'm not good with numbers :-)