bhd
Sat 21st Feb '09, 3:47am
The trend these days is for hosting companies to offer bigger and bigger plans for less and less. I guess the tight economy has spawned this and hosts are looking for an edge. The problem is, it's become insanity where hosting plans are now often bigger then your PC at home or in the office.
I have no problem with hosts overselling but when it comes to insanity, one needs to draw the line and question the validity of the plan being offered -
I think one needs to beware of the hosts offering massive "bazillion gigabyte" disk space and bandwidth accounts. Regardless of whether they know anything about vBulletin or not, no one can offer hosting for peanuts and give away a 500GB drive (literally) + free Google ads + lunch + beer + 1,001 other things ... not for 5 bucks or whatever they charge.
Anyone who stops to think will immediately come to the conclusion that it does not add up. Not as a business anyway.
For the uninitiated, here are some of the tricks hosts pull but don't tell you about:
a. The use of mod_throttle and mod_bandwidth etc to make sure you can never actually get the bandwidth they promise.
b. Limit concurrent Apache connections -- so that you can never really get a lot of visitors on your site at one time.
c. Run servers with so many accounts on them that they glow in the dark - making browsing like wading through glue.
d. Allows spammers onto their networks so that when your vBulletin sends out a confirmation email, it never gets to the recipient because it is treated as spam.
e. Limit either the number of database connections per user (account) on the server to a low number or, worse still, limit the number of MySQL queries your vBulletin can make per hour.
f. Offer 10,000 GB bandwidth with a 10Mb/S network card. Haha, what a joke -- a 10Mb/S network card can pump about 3,000GB for the whole server per month.
g. Insane firewall rules that drop any IP as a "DoS" attack for more than a trivial number of requets per minute.
There are many other things hosts can do to get around actually delivering what they promise. These are just some of them.
My point is simply this - you won't find any of the above mentioned in the advertising but they are questions you should and must ask because they are critical to your board performing efficiently.
Hope this helps someone.
I have no problem with hosts overselling but when it comes to insanity, one needs to draw the line and question the validity of the plan being offered -
I think one needs to beware of the hosts offering massive "bazillion gigabyte" disk space and bandwidth accounts. Regardless of whether they know anything about vBulletin or not, no one can offer hosting for peanuts and give away a 500GB drive (literally) + free Google ads + lunch + beer + 1,001 other things ... not for 5 bucks or whatever they charge.
Anyone who stops to think will immediately come to the conclusion that it does not add up. Not as a business anyway.
For the uninitiated, here are some of the tricks hosts pull but don't tell you about:
a. The use of mod_throttle and mod_bandwidth etc to make sure you can never actually get the bandwidth they promise.
b. Limit concurrent Apache connections -- so that you can never really get a lot of visitors on your site at one time.
c. Run servers with so many accounts on them that they glow in the dark - making browsing like wading through glue.
d. Allows spammers onto their networks so that when your vBulletin sends out a confirmation email, it never gets to the recipient because it is treated as spam.
e. Limit either the number of database connections per user (account) on the server to a low number or, worse still, limit the number of MySQL queries your vBulletin can make per hour.
f. Offer 10,000 GB bandwidth with a 10Mb/S network card. Haha, what a joke -- a 10Mb/S network card can pump about 3,000GB for the whole server per month.
g. Insane firewall rules that drop any IP as a "DoS" attack for more than a trivial number of requets per minute.
There are many other things hosts can do to get around actually delivering what they promise. These are just some of them.
My point is simply this - you won't find any of the above mentioned in the advertising but they are questions you should and must ask because they are critical to your board performing efficiently.
Hope this helps someone.