Site Troubles

Here’s specifically what happened and it’s a long story.

6 years ago I signed up with tierra.net. They had a special, $20 a month, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth but no extras.  No MySQL, no e-mail, no xtra accounts.  They charged me $2 a month per e-mail account but that was fine for me.  6 years ago that was a pretty good price.  Of course it wasn’t really unlimited but they didn’t have fixed limits written down.

I was there until April 2003 and I never once had a single problem with them.  The reason I switched was they told me in March that my scripts were using way too much CPU time and I was going to have to either get them under their limits within 30 days or pay $400 a month in CPU charges.  Since I was quiting my job in March I didn’t want a sudden unexpected bill so even though I might have been able to get the CPU usage down I didn’t want to risk it and so I switched ISPs to Lunarpages.com

Well, Lunarpages.com does not run their company professionally in my opinion.  Once I got the site up and the DNS switched over they immediately shut down my site saying that it was crashing their servers.  Now, I understand that they have to take measures to keep all the other sites on those servers running.  And, I understand that my scripts needed some work.  But, the issue is, why was tierra.net able to handle my site, never taking it offline once in 6 years and yet at Lunarpages it had crashed their servers and they had knocked me offline.  From my point of view, clearly Tierra.net knows how to configure stable servers and Lunarpages does not.  Worse, it’s just little old me but imagine if some large mail order company got taken offline by Lunarpages.  They’d sue for lost orders.  As for me, I was right in the middle of looking for a new job.  How do I know I didn’t lose a job because the people looking at my resume tried to check out my site and could not get to it?  How do I know orders for Thumbs were not lost during those days it was down?

Well, I fixed the scripts a bunch.  I started caching the front page as it’s the most CPU intensive.  I re-coded a very poorly designed system that connects the headlines to articles and I removed a bunch of stat tracking stuff that also took CPU time.  I believe that lowered my CPU usage, maybe even low enough that I could have stayed on Tierra.net.

But, a few days later I was knocked off again by Lunerpages.  I don’t remember specifically why they shut me down again but something else I was doing was crashing their servers.  Again, something that didn’t crash Tierra.net’s servers.  Anyway, I fixed that.

Then again, about 3 weeks ago, around the end of July 2003, they knocked me off again.  This time it was some lines in my .htaccess file.  The lines had been there since they were on my old ISP at tierra.net but for some reason those lines caused Lunarpages server to go into an infinite loop anytime someone tried to access a NON-EXISTANT page below the cgi-bin folder.  Why Tierra.net’s servers didn’t have this problem but Lunarpages did I don’t know.  What brought it to their attention was some spammer was trying to access a common script that many sites use.  My site didn’t have that script so the spammer was causing that bug to appear by trying to access the non-existant script.  Lunerpages actually though I had that script and was complaining about using an insecure script but after telling them I didn’t have that script I tried a few things and figured out the problem was in the .htaccess file.  Fortunately I didn’t need those lines in my .htaccess file so I took them out and the problem went away.

But, that finally pissed me off enough to want to move.  I signed up with BurtonHosting.com hoping that they knew how to better configure servers, more like Tierra.net, less like Lunarpages.com.  I moved my site over there, turned it on and they immediately knocked me off too.  For some reason, over at their servers, my scripts would just sit around on their server waiting for something and never finishing.  Why, I still don’t know.  Probably something to do with file permissions.

At that time I didn’t have time to look into the problem so I pointed my DNS back to Lunarpages.com which is the state I’m in now.  Knowing that Burtonhosting.com doesn’t do any better a job than Lunarpages.com there really is no reason to switch to them.  If I had a more stable job and knew where I was going to be living I’d probably try to run the site on my own servers but at the moment I’m between jobs and not sure if I’m staying in Japan or going somewhere else.

Sorry, I’m sure that’s way more then you wanted to know.  Suffice it to say, I can’t recommend either Lunarpages.com or Burtonhosting.com.  Sure they will say my scripts were buggy or heavy and I won’t deny that but I can hold up Tierra.net as a company that knew how to configure their servers so a problem script did not mean the site had to be taken down and also as a company that handled issues like this responsibly, giving me 30 days to fix any problem instead of just yanking my site offline and possibly costing me a job or sales or face.

I am currently looking for a new hosting company. I called Lunarpages and found that they could host several domain names with one account which was very appealing but if you are experiencing trouble then I will investigate them further.

Its hard to decide on a hosting company because you dont know what you are getting into until you have used them. And it is such a pain to change. Especially when you have a huge website.

I am wondering is there a page that reviews web hosting from an unbiased point of view?

By the way I am currently using spiderhosts.net and have experienced more downtime than I prefer to.

After much surfing, here’s my top 10 shared web hosting. (not in particular order)

hostmonster

bluehost

lunarpages

hostgator

ixwebhosting

startlogic

dreamhost

globat

1and1.com

anHosting

I know you have a different list than those listed above.

One of them caught my attention.

But doubtful… i did more surfing(read more forums comments & more reviews, etc.).

I found out that all of them have this in common…

the CPU LIMIT.

Yes, they offer lots of space & bandwidth.

But here’s the catch: you use too much cpu… they suspend your account.

So as you can see, there’s no way your going near the bandwidth you paid for. What a bunch of liars!

That’s my research, you should do your own.

Help me find a better host.

Tell me:

why you hate about your past web hosting?

who is your web hosting now?

how is your new web hosting is better than your previous one?

your website url? (so i can see how busy your site is.)

- slimetoner @ yahoo.com