When is shared hosting too little . . .

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  • roddy
    New Member
    • Apr 2005
    • 21
    • 3.0.7

    When is shared hosting too little . . .

    A question for those of you more experienced with Vbulletin hosting issues.

    About a month ago I moved my phpbb board to VB, and also changed hosts. Before moving my board had about 2500 visitors per day. I found a package with a recognized, named host, which at $10 a month gave me all the space and bandwidth I needed.

    Since moving to VB daily visitor numbers have steadily risen to about 4000, with users online showing at around 150-250 (NB: I have cookie timeout set to 1 hour, I think the default is 15 mins)

    Yesterday I turned on the internet to find my forums, and all my sites run on the same account, suspended.

    After emailing the host (they made no effort to contact me) they told me that the forums were using too much CPU / RAM, and they had to disable them. They are now claiming the site is too busy even for a shared dedicated server, and I will need a dedicated server to myself.

    My question is - does this sound reasonable? I can believe that my site is outgrowing a $10 shared hosting account. However, is a dedicated server really necessary?

    I'm not going to name the host at the moment. However, they are a well-recognised name, already recommended on here.

    Any advice?

    Roddy
  • greywolff
    Senior Member
    • Jan 2005
    • 123
    • 3.0.7

    #2
    what hosting company? and did you exceed your "space"....

    id use a different host ive had sites bigger than that and no problems?

    Comment

    • Zachery
      Former vBulletin Support
      • Jul 2002
      • 59097

      #3
      Not lunarpages by any chance is it?

      Well realisticly its hard to judge how many real users are online over that Cookie timeout.
      But unless you have some insane traffic I would guess you are still in a shared hosting enviroment.

      Is that 4000 hits or 4000 unique?

      Comment

      • rh2004
        Senior Member
        • Jan 2004
        • 470

        #4
        ASO allow you to have a max of 75 users on a 15min timeout, and that goes for most shared.

        Comment

        • Steve Machol
          Former Customer Support Manager
          • Jul 2000
          • 154488

          #5
          150-250 online users at one time is definitely too much for the vast majority of shared hosting accounts. Your site it too popular for this account.
          Steve Machol, former vBulletin Customer Support Manager (and NOT retired!)
          Change CKEditor Colors to Match Style (for 4.1.4 and above)

          Steve Machol Photography


          Mankind is the only creature smart enough to know its own history, and dumb enough to ignore it.


          Comment

          • GrrrlRomeo
            Member
            • Jan 2005
            • 33

            #6
            Alot of it depends on how many user accounts a host puts on a shared server. I think the cheaper the host, the more accounts they have on one server. I have VPS hosting which is sort of like dedicated in that I have a garaunteed allotment of resources because accounts are isolated from each other on the server, but it's not as expensive as dedicated. I think most VPS hosts will tell you up front how many users they put on a server...mine does anyway.

            Comment

            • AlienSector
              Senior Member
              • Oct 2004
              • 118

              #7
              If you are pushing 100 or more users online at any given time (with a normal timeout), you are border-line between shared and moving to semi-dedicated, VPS or another 'like' package.

              With a shared server, most likely sharing resources with at least 100 other websites, with semi-dedicated and VPS, that is normally reduced to between 5 and 25 (depending on that particular hosts setup).

              As above, are you receiving 4000 hits or 4000 unique visitors per day? If you are receiving 4000 unique visitors per day, it's probably time to move on .

              Comment

              • roddy
                New Member
                • Apr 2005
                • 21
                • 3.0.7

                #8
                02 Jun 2005 3749 16515 71795 326.72 MB
                03 Jun 2005 3614 30818 121483 538.45 MB
                04 Jun 2005 3039 13110 56133 252.36 MB
                05 Jun 2005 3089 11344 54134 232.26 MB
                That's date, no of visits, pages, hits, and bandwidth for the four days before they suspended me, according to Awstats.

                I'm not about to name the host at the moment, as I'm not yet sure how unreasonably they acted. From the above it seems people agree the site was too busy for a shared hosting environment (especially a $10 a month one). However, when they moved me to a dedicated server for a week for free, to allow me to decide what to do (which is a fairly decent thing to do) the add-on domains weren't shifted. As my forums is an add-on domain, a thriving community hit the dust. At the moment they're telling me I need to update the DNS - if they'd sent me an email telling me that at the same time as moving it, i could have had it done by now. I also find it suspicious that my forums runs perfectly well for a month, and then suddenly is suspended for using '100% of RAM'.

                As i have been on the road for the last week, I haven't been able to do anything about it until now, and we'll probably have had a full week of down-time by the time I get it fixed.

                Thanks for everyone's advice. Guess I'm off to look at dedicated servers. Poor wallet . . .

                Roddy

                Comment

                • Zachery
                  Former vBulletin Support
                  • Jul 2002
                  • 59097

                  #9
                  Eh, I really don't think 10 gigs of bandwidth is pusing a dedicated host.

                  Sounds like you just need a better host in general.

                  To me it sounds like whoever you are with, is illequpied to be server dynamic php/mysql applications to the www.

                  They seem to be more orinated towards static html.

                  Comment

                  • roddy
                    New Member
                    • Apr 2005
                    • 21
                    • 3.0.7

                    #10
                    They've never said it was a bandwidth issue, it's a cpu / ram issue. If they'd given me warning before shutting me down I could have tweaked the options, but they didn't . . .

                    Comment

                    • Zachery
                      Former vBulletin Support
                      • Jul 2002
                      • 59097

                      #11
                      Bandwidth and CPU/ ram are generally tied together,

                      Lots of bandwidth consumtion means that you are going to use alot more resources.

                      Even with every option on, I cannot see how that would tax any system grealty, to such a point to shut down an account.

                      Being a host myself I do keep watch of what my users are doing from time to time, by viewing resource utilization, but none of them are going out of control, consideing one or two have smiliar stats to your own.

                      Comment

                      • PGN
                        Senior Member
                        • Jan 2005
                        • 124
                        • 3.0.3

                        #12
                        I recommend you check out these packages:
                        Pentium XL Dedicated Server - 20GB Space - 200GB Bandwidth
                        VPS - 3GB Space - 100GB Bandwidth

                        I'm guessing the second one will probably be best for you

                        Comment

                        • Steve Machol
                          Former Customer Support Manager
                          • Jul 2000
                          • 154488

                          #13
                          Just a reminder that it's against the forum rules to post links with referrer IDs on these forums.
                          Steve Machol, former vBulletin Customer Support Manager (and NOT retired!)
                          Change CKEditor Colors to Match Style (for 4.1.4 and above)

                          Steve Machol Photography


                          Mankind is the only creature smart enough to know its own history, and dumb enough to ignore it.


                          Comment

                          • roddy
                            New Member
                            • Apr 2005
                            • 21
                            • 3.0.7

                            #14
                            I'm not looking for recommendations, either here or by pm (and I've had both)

                            Comment

                            • Zachery
                              Former vBulletin Support
                              • Jul 2002
                              • 59097

                              #15
                              Roddy, I would advise looking for a more compentant hosting company who isn't going to just try to upsell you a plan.

                              Comment

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