My first two weeks at Hostgator

[walsoft]

After reading several reviews around the web, I thought hostgator would make a good host to move one of my websites to. Now I have been by and large happy with my existing host for several years, but have too many sites with them, so wanted to diversify.

So I join on the 20th of December, and get the site up and running within 24 hours. Marvellous !!

The package I signed up to was baby gator 1000gigs transfer and 100gig space. Now, nowhere would I expect to get anywhere near those levels, maybe 3gigs per days tops on an very good day !, and my website, like most is a tiddler at just 30megs space.

Anyway fast forward near 2 weeks and today my sites down ! Huh ! A page not found !

Yikes – Panic stations as I try to fathom out what went wrong ?

* Has the server changed PHP ?
* Have my pages become corrupted ?
* Is the database corrupted ?
* HELP !!!

I contact support and they tell me everything is ok with the server
So off I go and finally after a couple of hours determine that index.php has been neutered ! with ZERO permissions !

Huh ??? So I contact support and I’m told that there’s another ticket that says that I have been suspended due to abuse, basically because I accessed the server too much !!!

Specifically the stats given are –

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
14342 username 26 10 29624 16m 4172 R 30 0.4 0:00.89 /usr/bin/php index.php
29329 username 27 10 27544 14m 4140 R 19 0.4 0:00.57 /usr/bin/php index.php
14565 mysql 15 0 243m 136m 4476 S 17 3.4 297:48.71 /usr/sbin/mysqld --basedir=/ --datadir=/var/lib/mysq
15940 username 27 10 26636 13m 4140 R 11 0.3 0:00.35 /usr/bin/php index.php
15844 username 27 10 26132 13m 4140 R 7 0.3 0:00.30 /usr/bin/php index.php
15696 username 28 10 27548 14m 4140 R 6 0.4 0:00.54 /usr/bin/php index.php
7041 username 27 10 27548 14m 4140 R 6 0.4 0:00.48 /usr/bin/php index.php
23308 username 28 10 27548 14m 4140 R 6 0.4 0:00.44 /usr/bin/php index.php
4877 username 27 10 26908 13m 4140 R 6 0.3 0:00.38 /usr/bin/php index.php
27410 username 29 10 28424 15m 4140 R 5 0.4 0:00.77 /usr/bin/php index.php
30219 username 27 10 27544 14m 4140 R 3 0.4 0:00.59 /usr/bin/php index.php


If I am reading the above properly, At the peak I used the server for about 2 seconds at 30%, with several ocxasions when the server was used for between 6 and 11% for 40 seconds.

Additionally a couple of images used 100% load for about 20 seconds in total.

Does this warrant suspension without notice ?

What does this mean in terms of the hosting plan that I have signed up to ?

For, I am using less than 3 gig bandwidth per day, with about 10,000 to 15,000 visitors per day !

What happened to the 1000 gig transfer per month or 33gigs per day promised by sales ?

Anyway I sat twiddling my thumbs and posting as such to the support, saying I will cut the bandwidth etc… by shrinking the page size down from say 100k to 30k by removing images.

When I did not receive any reply, I pointed my namservers elsewhere over two hours ago so the site is back alive !

So in the end about 6.5 hours have been wasted when I could have been working, 2 hours on diagnosing what’s wrong, 2 hours twiddling my thumbs and 2 hours in prepping the other site to take over. And half on hour on this post.

Doing a quick check just before I make this post, I see that the site would now working off my user name.

I am left wondering………..
Should I switch name servers back to Hostgator or not ?
What will happen to my site tomorrow if I do so ?
What do I tell my site visitors, should I let them know why the site was down for 6+ hours ?

I wish I could receive clarification on exactly what I have signed up to ? As its not tallying with what I was led to believe.

Oh well, I am really tired…. Yawn… to think I could have written 3 or 4 articles in the last 6 hours L

[walsoft]

It should be stated somewhere that if you get more than 10,000 visitors a day then you will likely hit the server load limit and your site will be suspended.

As otherwise it hits people out of the blue !

Who after all that hard work of driving traffic, just at their very peak ! See it taken away, just like that !

Leaves a bad taste.

Much better to be aware before you sign on the dotted line, that -

a. Yes you have plenty of bandwidth
b. Yes you have plenty of web space

BUT
c. If your usage goes above 10k visitors (approx) then theres a chance of your site being suspended / pulled.

It is important, and if people know before hand then it can't hit them out of the blue.

Its no good saying > 25% server load for 90seconds, as we have no idea what that actually means, since there is no cpanel stat that gives your own server load usage, and then only discovering what it means AFTER the fact ! when ones website gets wiped off the face of the www.

Yeh now I know about it, and know that when traffic surges to pull the plug myself for a few mins.

BUT you folks reading, do you know ? Do you
and you
and you

oh and offcourse - You over there ? Do you know ? Now anyway ....

[walsoft]

This is what that 6 hour plug being pulled did to the traffic to mysite -

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/bw-2007.png

Killed it stone dead, undid months and months of work just like that !

[GatorBrent]

We actually don't go by limits at all.....


This is what we do...,


We monitor server loads and outages, and when a server load goes high for a while or theres an outgae we investigate it. In this case your sites huge burst of traffic for a single day caused downtime for everyone on the server. The only way to get all the sites backup was by taking care of the problem which was the amount of traffic your site was. If your site wasn't database driven 15k page views would be fine, but due to how it was built this was to much for a shared environment.

Right now your site is getting around 1k unqiues a day and is the 2nd heaviest user on the server of 246 sites. I'm sure you can imagine how much usage 15x that usage would be. If you have any questions please pm me as I would be happy to answer them.