Advice about a hosting company

[irc]

I had been running my message board on a small host called 5dollarhosting.com for a long time and it was working quite well until I got a huge surge in traffic this summer. My bandwidth went from 7-10 gb a month to 35-40. And my bill got out of control.

So I searched around and I found f5hosting.com and signed up for their semi-dedicated option. It seemed like a good deal. Plenty of bandwidth, a reasonable price and an assurance that they could handle a lot of traffic.

A couple of weeks ago, I had some strange occurance where the server jumped to a 50 load and they suspended my account. For two hours in the middle of the day, they did not respond to my emails to tell me what the problem was. Finally, they turned it back on and asked me to make some changes in my vbulletin board to reduce load. I turned off gzip and turned on the max load function. It mostly did the trick, although it annoys my users to see the "Server busy" whenever the load spikes above a 5.

Here is the real problem, despite the fact that when the server spikes, my board automatically takes care of the problem, whenever my board spikes above a 7, f5hosting turns off my account and giving my users this message:

http://neptune.f5hosting.com/suspended.page/

This is very alarming to my users. Sometimes they think it's directed at them. Others, who keep journals on my site are worried that my site is going to just disappear.

When I talk to support, they are unresponsive. I feel like they won't be happy till I turn down my max server load to a 3, thereby annoying my users with server busy messages constantly.

Is it unreasonable to turn off a website every time the server load spikes above a 7? Should I be shopping for a new host?

[Tolitz]

Originally posted by irc
When I talk to support, they are unresponsive. This should be enough reason to start shopping for a new one ... I was hosted with F5 last year and they offered impeccable service, but that was at a time when there were still a few clients, and customer service was still personable. I don't know what the situation is now ;)

Anyway, my site was growing and I didn't want to deal with a fledgeling webhost's "growing pains" (altho I loved their service), so I switched to a veteran in the industry - Ventures Online (http://www.venturesonline.com) ... I dunno if their Virtual Private Servers (http://www.venturesonline.com/hosting/vps.html) would be comparable to the semi-dedicated plan you are getting from F5, but check it out and decide if you wanna switch or not.

Regardless of whether you stay or not, good luck!

[Coreace]

Originally posted by irc
I had been running my message board on a small host called 5dollarhosting.com for a long time and it was working quite well until I got a huge surge in traffic this summer. My bandwidth went from 7-10 gb a month to 35-40. And my bill got out of control.

So I searched around and I found f5hosting.com and signed up for their semi-dedicated option. It seemed like a good deal. Plenty of bandwidth, a reasonable price and an assurance that they could handle a lot of traffic.

A couple of weeks ago, I had some strange occurance where the server jumped to a 50 load and they suspended my account. For two hours in the middle of the day, they did not respond to my emails to tell me what the problem was. Finally, they turned it back on and asked me to make some changes in my vbulletin board to reduce load. I turned off gzip and turned on the max load function. It mostly did the trick, although it annoys my users to see the "Server busy" whenever the load spikes above a 5.

Here is the real problem, despite the fact that when the server spikes, my board automatically takes care of the problem, whenever my board spikes above a 7, f5hosting turns off my account and giving my users this message:

http://neptune.f5hosting.com/suspended.page/

This is very alarming to my users. Sometimes they think it's directed at them. Others, who keep journals on my site are worried that my site is going to just disappear.

When I talk to support, they are unresponsive. I feel like they won't be happy till I turn down my max server load to a 3, thereby annoying my users with server busy messages constantly.

Is it unreasonable to turn off a website every time the server load spikes above a 7? Should I be shopping for a new host? You should be shopping for another host ASAP.

[gamr]

what a charming isp, id die if i saw that error appear on my website. time to change isp.

i dont know how much your paying atm for what you have but inetsalestech.com have done right by me and have a wild server (you'll see what i mean when you goto the site)

[F5Hosting]

Hmmm...seems to me like your site was running our server crazy with some journal that you had on it with 3-400 people on that one thread at one time. Is it fair to others on that server if your ONE SITE is bringing that server to its knees? The server you are on is a killer server and it runs fine until the code on your site got out of whack with whatever you are running. Is it fair to the others on that server to have THEIR sits down just so we can keep yours up and run that server in the ground? Is it fair to them?

I have other customers on that server and when YOUR site runs the load to over 40...yes I said 40 - FORTY!!!!! Then I have to do something to bring that load down..this means suspending the offending site.

If you are so worried about seeing that suspended page, then please fix your code. If you didnt have so many apache processes and mySQL processes sticking at once, your site would never get suspended.

I thought we had this worked out via private email, but apparently you saw fit to drag this into a public forum. Our response times to your tickets were within the hour EVERY single time. To come here and say that we were unresponsive is just plain false. If you or nayone else here needs proof that we responded and at what times, we have that documented and can provide you with the actual tickets and times.

If you are looking for another host, that is fine. I promise you that no other hosting company is going to let ONE SITE run up the load on their servers and not suspend your site. No way, no how. I have a responsibility to the other sites on that server to keep them running at optimum speeds and if that server load goes up, they slow down dramatically. Im sorry if you feel we slighted you by trying to keep our server under control.

[Steve Machol]

Please take this to private communications.