Not recommented for reseller hosting

[kalexan]

Hostgator is neither reliable, nor professional enough for reselling services.

- A year ago I had to move my websites to a new reseller account, at a new server, because of my initial server's really poor performance. I have kept that reseller account for backup reasons but never used it: it still performs awfully

- It is not a fully managed solution for sure. I have spent so much time asking to do things with chat, ticket even phone. These requests could be carried out by myself at the 1/10th of the time that I spent trying to convince support about the problems

- Chat support representatives always serve canned answers. A had a chat with a reseller recently and he gave me instructions that apply only to dedicated server customers. He realized that I am a reseller after 20 minutes

- Support Tickets take more than twice the time to be answered, compared to the time responded when I signed up with hostgator 3 years ago

- I never had clear info at HG billing system about their charges: I never knew how many unique IPs and SSLs were installed and on which accounts

- From Summer, MySQL performs poorly at my latest reseller environment. I have opened multiple tickets on this but support always told me that performance is “acceptable” for a reseller environment. (Yeah, almost daily “Too many connections” error, site time outs every 8-9 subsequent http calls)

- From about the end of December server load has been skyrocketed (from about 4-5/8CPUs to 15-20/8CPUs). Hostgator responded that the daily (24h) average is 8-10/CPUs which is still “acceptable” for reselling. So if the server hits 50-60 peaks in 8 (working) hours that last for about 5 minutes, customers experience is fine, isn’t it?

- For the past 2 days , HG installed to all shared- reseller servers a script which calculates an account’s performance as far as database is concerned, and it shuts down database access for 5 minutes, without any notice. The script had bugs (it was too sensitive), so ALL of my eshops went down for a whole day. They deactivated the script for a while, now it is back again causing problems to websites again. The script was installed without any notice to the resellers.

I would like to point out that all of my websites use caching mechanisms (I take performance really seriously) and their visits are generally really low. Although I asked HG explicitly multiple times whether the problems were caused by any of my accounts, they responded that if it was, they would take down the website and inform me so.

Today, in a 3 hours timeframe, I received automated notifications that a bunch of my websites produce really high load to the server and need to be taken offline. Most of these sites where operational for many years, and also some of them have 20-30 visitors per day!!!

So, why stay?

[GatorFord]

Can you please PM me a ticket number or your domain name that is associated with your reseller account? The domain in your forum profile doesn't appear to be resolving. I'd be happy to look into this for you and answer any questions. Thanks.

[GatorFord]

I was able to actually locate your account with additional searching. Upon further investigation I'm seeing that the actual problem you are having with server performance appears to be directly related to several of your resold clients, and extremely large numbers of MySQL tables being read. (in some cases we are talking about anywhere from 40 million to 125 million table rows being read, which is extremely high and would cause a problem on likely any machine we offer). At this point, I'm confident that any reseller server or even dedicated server we migrate these accounts to is going to have problems unless these MySQL queries are either optimized, or the amount of table rows being read by these queries is reduced. The problems you are seeing on the server seem to be directly being caused by several accounts under your reseller.

I will create a new ticket to specifically identify the 4 accounts which I believe to be causing the heaviest CPU and MySQL usage under your account, and are causing problems as a result.

[kalexan]

Thank you for your response.

Please clarify: the amount of rows read, in what time frame is referred to?

All of the accounts you have mentioned at your ticket (3, not 4), exist on the server for several months, one of them is for more than two years. Two of them are OsCommerce websites with all caching mechanisms activated, and moreover, I have performed a lot of code optimizations, as far as database access is concerned, resulting to reducing each page to depend on 30-40 really light mysql queries, when cache is already generated. According to google analytics, daily visitors do not exceed 1000 users for the most popular one, so in my opinion, database design and programming can't be the reason of an 8 core beast to suffer so much.

However, I have already started to transfer several websites to another environment after my customers' requests.

[GatorFord]

Originally Posted by kalexan

Thank you for your response.

Please clarify: the amount of rows read, in what time frame is referred to?

All of the accounts you have mentioned at your ticket (3, not 4), exist on the server for several months, one of them is for more than two years. Two of them are OsCommerce websites with all caching mechanisms activated, and moreover, I have performed a lot of code optimizations, as far as database access is concerned, resulting to reducing each page to depend on 30-40 really light mysql queries, when cache is already generated. According to google analytics, daily visitors do not exceed 1000 users for the most popular one, so in my opinion, database design and programming can't be the reason of an 8 core beast to suffer so much.

However, I have already started to transfer several websites to another environment after my customers' requests.

These MySQL statistics harvested are over a 5 minute period, and in this period these 3 accounts as you've clarified are indeed causing an exceptional amount of table row reads and selects over a large amount of rows and will cause CPU problems. Keep in mind that on a reseller environment you are sharing the machine with other users, and while a dedicated server with 8 cores may not have a problem with this extremely heavy SQL activity, a machine which is populated with other users also performing MySQL queries will suffer because of it. I sincerely believe that a dedicated server is the best option for you given the amount of CPU usage these 3 accounts in particular continue to generate. Please let me know if there is anything else I can clarify for you.

[kalexan]

The biggest database has 235,502 rows at 76 tables, so even with the most impossible scenario that my scripts read the whole database in each page view, the whole database is read 125.000.000/235,502 = approx 530 times in 5 minutes (2 times per second)!

However:
- Each page view typically fetches approx 500 rows from the database
- Daily visitors (24h) do not exceed 1000.
- Scriprs are OsCommerce with a lot of code optimizations (20-40 really light queries per page view and all caching mechanisms enabled)

There is something else going wrong...

Now, you have blocked a whole database for 16 hours by making it inaccessible by me, I can't even take a backup to transfer the website, and the funny thing is that you have requested me to "optimize the tables"!
How I can optimize the database if can't have access at the database at all? Why didn't you block the website with http access instead? Or it is some kind of punishment?

[GatorFord]

I sent you a PM regarding any further problems you may be having to discuss this further if you could reply to me I'll be more than happy to work with you further. Thanks.

[GatorBrent]

I just sent you the following email.

Hello,

I'm the owner of hostgator and just came across your review
http://forums.hostgator.com/not-reco...g-t104957.html

I'm very sorry for any of the problems you've had with us, and I'd like to do everything in my power to restore your faith is us as well attempt to figure out a solution that works for both of us.

This is a catch 22 issue.........


You are complaining due to load issues and slowness, and your reseller account seems to be using more resources then at least half of the server combined, and is the one causing all the problems. We can't fix the issue without kicking your account. I've reviewed your usage as well as ticket history and one thing is clear you are no longer suitable for a shared environment.

I'm afraid to say that I'm going to have to require you upgrade or cancel your account at this time. You are going to continue to be upset with us for an issue that you're causing.

I've wrote more in the email with a possible solution please respond back to me. Thanks!!