duncanriley.com - Latest Comments in Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Lunarpages review — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 10:27:10 -0000

lunarpages is the one you should consider, they are good at customer support

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Liz — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:28:00 -0000

We left LW for the same reasons. We are now doing what you are doing with a dedicated server at Server Intellect. Having your own server is great NEVER get turned off for using up all the resources.

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Ashley — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:28:44 -0000

Yes, I agree with the Surpass rant. They are horrible to work with and aren't reliable. I've been over changed a $100 USD for just changing a domain name, then I had everything setup on two websites and lost everything on both. I can keep going on....

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

EnvyGeeks — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:46:39 -0000

LiquidWeb sucks to be honest. We had a client site sit on a server with them, the server kept on crashing from small bursted loads, at the time I wasn't in-charge of the server so we submitted a ticket to have them adjust the child processes and they said they would "optimize" the server and it still kept on crashing out. Eventually we go so pissed off from all the money being lost by their administrators lack of ability that we moved to Serverbeach (I've used them before plenty of times), haven't had a problem since, even during heavy advertising campaigns. I'll never use LiquidWeb again and I'm sure my client won't either because she had a way worse time before I came around to help her.

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

ac — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 05:20:21 -0000

Key thing to make it possible of course is the limited API to do that. You need to have the database pretty much on the client side so it doesn't load their servers with a flood of queries. But that's no issue for a blogging soft.

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

ac — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 05:13:48 -0000

Silverlight developers can get pretty sweet deal from Live assuming they write their own blogging software from the scratch, not too hard with SL though.

"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 :-)

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

yuri vieira — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 02:11:02 -0000

I had the same experience with JKAHosting.com and RoutHost.com. (Just for the record: "JKAHosting sucks and Routhost sucks!") They offer a lot of disk space and bandwidth, but, if you use a CMS (Wordpress and Joomla, for instance), your site always goes down. Now, Routhost has suspended my account. They claim my website is "causing load issues". And I believe all the companies will claim the same. They don't want so many visitors. Your success means trouble for them.
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Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Rafael Gil — Wed, 16 May 2007 16:16:42 -0000

I totally agree SURPASS HOSTING SUCKS!!! We were not finished deploying our campaign while the server just blew up when advertising appeared on the TV. They suspended our domain and notified after an hour that. They even blocked the DNS Change option and so we couldn't migrate our domain to another host until 5 hours later and then they went to sleep. We had no response neither next morning 24 hours later the problem was not solved. They seriously suck really bad.

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Randy — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 13:07:23 -0000

Site5 has the worst technical support. They recently made some upgrades which have caused my sites to go down. I hope someone sues them.

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Gabe — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 13:25:41 -0000

I generally share your sentiments about Site5 and Dreamhost. The problem with Site5 is they don't know how to monitor individual usage. Plus they run the databases on the same box. So when someone starts overloading the server they just don't have the tools to isolate the problem. Instead they make some claim about 'investigating the problem' (probably logfile analysis of some sort) to try to figure out what's going on.

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.

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

duncan — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 23:17:13 -0000

Kayla,
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.

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Max — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 20:50:48 -0000

Well I have to say I have my site on surpass and their tech support is nothing but great... quick to solve problems and if something comes up they can answer it without a problem, some questions will take longer in some cases, but I have read so many people that have had a bad experiance with surpass hosting all over the net. Many times Kayla comes up to speak about that issue because, most people that post about this instances, do not give the whole story.

Max

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Edwin — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 09:01:32 -0000

I've got my hosting directly from surpass for a month or two, but indirectly for over two years and I must say that I've found no problems with them, as I have had with others. They are always ready and helpfull with your site. Even if it was my own fault I got help from them, mostly within the hour.

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Kayla — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 02:40:14 -0000

Hi,

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

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Nova — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 14:55:29 -0000

Incredible. You've just summed up my experience with Site 5 completely. Down to the last detail. My most recent letter from them accused me of breaking TOS, calling me an 'offender' and 'a threat' to their other websites.

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!

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Chrono Cr@cker — Fri, 26 May 2006 09:14:15 -0000

@ Duncan: Have you started moderating all comments over here?

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Chrono Cr@cker — Fri, 26 May 2006 09:12:06 -0000

500 Visitors in an hour crashed their servers??? Good lord...... What would happen if they hosted sites like Techcrunch..

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.

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Mike — Thu, 25 May 2006 20:41:55 -0000

I am on Dreamhost with a number of low traffic sites, and they seem to be fine. I understand what you are saying about shared hosting being a scam, but if you think how little it costs and how much money you can make off your sites, it is all fairly cheap. Also think how much money it must cost to cover a techies wages for a month.

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

John Evans (Syntagma) — Wed, 24 May 2006 15:15:58 -0000

Well, I use Site5, as you know Duncan. In six months I've never had a serious problem. In fact, this week they're reducing the number of sites on each box by a half, which is quite a number. They've also brought in technical people to monitor the farm round the clock.

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. :-)

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

Jesse — Wed, 24 May 2006 10:41:39 -0000

Three hosts that I have seen universaly recommended and have yet to see a single valid complaint against are Media Temple, Bluehost, and A Small Orange.

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

Re: Surpass Hosting Sucks, or the problem with shared hosting

HART (1-800-HART) — Wed, 24 May 2006 04:45:40 -0000

That was interesting. But .. How can you tell that Dreamhost is a 'shared hosting' service? I couldn't see that anywhere on their website ..

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.