Important Questions

Hi,

I'm considering becoming a customer of Host Gator, but I have a few questions before deciding. I've had several different hosts in the past, and unfortunately I'm well aware (from past experience) that the quality of a host can dramatically impact the performance of a web site.

Here are my questions:

1) I've read many favorable reviews about Host Gator, where you are rated within the top 10 of all reviewed hosts. To be honest, I'm unsure whether I should consider those reviews while considering which host to use. I've heard rumors that some hosting services pay for favorable reviews. I'm not accusing host gator of doing this, but I'm wondering if you can point me to one or more independent host review sites that are verified to be completely unbiased. I hate to ask you this question, but I'm just trying to be careful.

2) In your company information, you mentioned that "The Planet" is your actual computer center for host gator. Your company is located in Florida and "The Planet" is in Texas. I went to "The Planet" web site, and they listed Host Gator as one of their resellers. I assume this means that you have a contract to use an allotted amount of their servers and network. I'm concerned that this geographic distance between your support staff and the actual servers may have an effect on your ability to provide quick support when problems arise. I'm not saying that this is the case, but I would like to hear your response to this.

3) I'm going to be running the Xoops portal system on my domain. Will the "Baby" or "Swamp" plan be able to handle a moderate to high traffic Xoops site? I don't envision there being "extreme" volumes of traffic, but something similar to the traffic that occurs on the xoops support site, which is at www.xoops.org. Most of the traffic will either be reading articles/news on the site (read only PHP operations), posting comments, or reading and posting to the forums. Will the "Baby" or "Swamp" plans be able to handle this without there being extremely slow page loading times or site crashes? I cannot afford a semi-dedicated or dedicated plan at this time, so I would need to use one of your shared plans to start.

4) How effective is the security of your servers? I'm currently using a host that seems to be having security problems. I have an xoops site that has not yet been available or known to the public, and I'm the only one with password access to the site (it is turned off). However, it was hacked the other day, which means that the hacking assault must have originated from the host's shared server that my site currently resides on. Do you have any security features in place that would prevent a hacker from infecting sites through your server? I realize that you can't prevent direct attacks on a site from the Internet, or from a member of a web site that obtained administrative access or uploaded a script through the site. However, I'm wondering if you have a way of preventing infected web sites on a shared server from hacking other sites on the same server.

5) If I decide to upgrade from the "Baby" plan to the "Swamp" plan, is there an upgrade charge? I've read a few different posts on your forums about this, but it really isn't clear to me what your policy is on this. If I upgrade from shared server plan to shared server plan, would my site remain on the same server? How long does it take to upgrade a plan?

Sorry for all the questions!

Thank you,
Dave

[Serra]

I can't answer FOR Hostgator, but as a client I can give you my point of view.

1) I've read many favorable reviews about Host Gator, where you are rated within the top 10 of all reviewed hosts. To be honest, I'm unsure whether I should consider those reviews while considering which host to use. I've heard rumors that some hosting services pay for favorable reviews. I'm not accusing host gator of doing this, but I'm wondering if you can point me to one or more independent host review sites that are verified to be completely unbiased. I hate to ask you this question, but I'm just trying to be careful.

I don't believe a word on those sites either. I'm not sure their is an unbiased site.

2) I'm concerned that this geographic distance between your support staff and the actual servers may have an effect on your ability to provide quick support when problems arise. I'm not saying that this is the case, but I would like to hear your response to this.

I've worked in support as a systems analyst and I can tell you that distance means nothing when it comes to support. I supported boxes all over the east coast and I couldn't tell the difference between one in town and one a thousand miles away.

The Planet does prove the local hands on support, as far as I can tell, so if a machine needs to be kicked, HG calls the planet and tells them how hard.

3) Will the "Baby" or "Swamp" plans be able to handle this without there being extremely slow page loading times or site crashes? I cannot afford a semi-dedicated or dedicated plan at this time, so I would need to use one of your shared plans to start.

I can't answer this, but I can say that there are restrictions on those plans that limit the number of mySQL connections you can have at one time. There are also process power limitations enforced.

4) How effective is the security of your servers?

They do not allow shell access and they are fairly strict on mySQL access, the default being only localhost can access DBs. Security wise, I give them two thumbs up. In fact, you might find they are a little too secure some times.

5) If I decide to upgrade from the "Baby" plan to the "Swamp" plan, is there an upgrade charge?

I can't answer for HG, but in my experience they never charge to upgrade and do it quickly and mostly painlessly. Overall, the reason you pay a bit extra for HG over other companies is because they are so responsive support wise. You can surely find cheaper hosting if you look, but I'd rather not risk my business.

Originally Posted by Seeking Answers

Hi,

I'm considering becoming a customer of Host Gator, but I have a few questions before deciding.

Sorry for all the questions!

Pretty much to a T what he said :-)

Hi,

Thank you for all the feedback! HG sounds like a great company. The only thing I'm worried about is the MySQL connections limitation. After your response, I searched for other posts regarding this issue, and it is now a great concern to me.

If my site becomes very popular, then I can easily envision there being many occasions when there are "at least" 25 pages simultaneously queried from MySQL (by 25 users on the site) at the same time. The site is going to contain frequently searched news, articles, and be a place where members will actively discuss topics in the forums. With that in mind, it sounds like the site will lockup quite often due to the MySQL connections limitation. Although, it could be that I don't quite understand how this works. I'm not really an expert on how Xoops or any well built script will manage connections (I should probably research this more).

I know that there is the ability to set a cache on each section of the site, which will limit the amount of queries sent. However, I really don't know what will result if I set a cache on something like a forum module. I don't think that would work, since a forum is so dynamic. The cache setting is primarily for content that doesn't change much. That is my understanding anyway.

Dave

Originally Posted by Seeking Answers

"at least" 25 pages simultaneously queried from MySQL (by 25 users on the site)

Hi there, this doesnt mean that you can only have 25 people on the site. You can actually have quite alot more. This means that there can not be over 25 open mysql connections at once. Which means the only time it would be a problem is if 26 people clicked your link at the same time to open a connection. Then the 26th person would get a connection error, until they refreshed.

As long as it is a well made script it can be used usually with no problems, of course if you end up with quite a lot of traffic you would not want to be on a shared server anyway.

[Serra]

Originally Posted by GatorJay

As long as it is a well made script it can be used usually with no problems

Hmmm... I will not touch that...


Anyway, HG does have a 30 day money back guarentee, so you could put it up and see how it goes. If it were me, I would look at how many users your site has on it at one time. (checking your users per hour graph on your stat software) If there are thousands, it will be a problem, if it is a 100, then it will not be a problem.

If my site becomes very popular, then I can easily envision there being many occasions when there are "at least" 25 pages simultaneously queried from MySQL (by 25 users on the site) at the same time.

As GatorJay said, if you have 25 users clicking at the same time constantly, then your site is going to be a bit too busy for a shared account anyway. My guess is that you could get away with between 500-750 users at a time using your system before the 25 user limit was a problem. I'm sorry to say that that many people would burn up your bandwith fairly fast.

If you have 500-750 users on your site all of the time, I'd expect your hosting cost to well exceed a shared hosting account's cost.

Hi GatorJay,

You said:

"This doesnt mean that you can only have 25 people on the site. You can actually have quite alot more. This means that there can not be over 25 open mysql connections at once. Which means the only time it would be a problem is if 26 people clicked your link at the same time to open a connection. Then the 26th person would get a connection error, until they refreshed."

My response:

The problem is that any portal system (such as xoops) or forum system is designed to be database generated and user interactive, not static. Thus, if there are 26 people on my site at any given time, then they are likely clicking links and opening database generated pages on a frequent basis. If 100 people are currently on my site, then what is the probability that 25 of those people will click on a link or open a database generated page at the same time? Well, I don't really have the answer to that, but common sense tells me that it would happen quite often. Unfortunately, most web surfers want instant gratification while web surfing, which means they wont stick around if they continously receive connection errors, and probably will never come back (unless they love the site so much that they will tolerate the frequent site errors).

Are there MySQL connection restrictions on the semi-dedicated plan? It would be great if you had a lower end semi-dedicated plan that was priced between the shared swamp plan and your current semi-dedicated plan, maybe $35.00 or $40.00 dollars per month. I'm sure you would find a lot of people/companies who would signup for a plan like that, since they need high bandwidth and dependable database connectivity, but have a limited budget for hosting.

The web sites that need high bandwidth are often the sites that are database driven. Thus, high bandwidth is really not as good as it sounds, if there is a very restrictive limit on concurrent database connections.

I really like the packages that you offer, but the MySQL connection issue is a very significant problem for any kind of moderate to high traffic portal or forum. I was hoping that there were some shared server options available, where I could get by with moderate traffic until I was ready to upgrade to something semi-dedicated or dedicated. Honestly, I don't think that the 25 connection limit would even be compatible with a moderate traffic database driven web site.

Are there any other options? Any way to boost the connectivity on a shared plan?

Dave

Originally Posted by Seeking Answers

connection restrictions on the semi-dedicated plan? It would be great if you had a lower end semi-dedicated plan that was priced between the shared swamp plan and your current semi-dedicated plan, maybe $35.00 or $40.00 dollars per month. I'm sure you would find a lot of people/companies who would signup for a plan like that, since they need high bandwidth and dependable database connectivity, but have a limited budget for hosting.

No, there are no restrictions on the semi-dedicated. But as said above you can have quite a few users on without going over that limit. Many people run forums such as phpbb and vbulletin with portals. Or PHP-Nuke and other CMS systems with no problems. It really just depends on the traffic you are getting.

By all means though, if you feel your site is going to generate enough traffic to cause those problems its better to go with the semi-dedicated to be safe.

Originally Posted by Serra

Anyway, HG does have a 30 day money back guarentee, so you could put it up and see how it goes. If it were me, I would look at how many users your site has on it at one time. (checking your users per hour graph on your stat software) If there are thousands, it will be a problem, if it is a 100, then it will not be a problem.

That is a good idea. I will probably need to take it a day at a time, and observe what is going on with the traffic. I wish I had stats from busy portal/forum sites, so that I could better estimate how the traffic behaves (such as how many hits, pages, there are at any one time).

Originally Posted by Serra

As GatorJay said, if you have 25 users clicking at the same time constantly, then your site is going to be a bit too busy for a shared account anyway. My guess is that you could get away with between 500-750 users at a time using your system before the 25 user limit was a problem. I'm sorry to say that that many people would burn up your bandwith fairly fast.

I would take a guess that if my site became very busy, there would be between 100 and 200 people visiting at very busy times. Although, I could be estimating too high or low. I guess the critical issue is regarding how people behave on a portal/forum. Do they surf all over the site, or just go to their favorite place, click a link or two and leave? There should be a research organization that does a study on that!

Originally Posted by Serra

If you have 500-750 users on your site all of the time, I'd expect your hosting cost to well exceed a shared hosting account's cost.

If I have that many people always on my site, then it would become profitable enough for me to afford a high capacity dedicated server. However, there is no way to know how popular my site will become. I may never need anything beyond a semi-dedicated server.

Anyway, I will probably give HG a try with a shared server plan to start.

Dave