Questions about HostGator

[tinytimrob]

Hi there!

I have been with free web hosting for about 12 months now but have recently had some major downtime. I am thinking of moving to paid hosting here at HostGator to eliminate problems with downtime and slow server response.

I currently run Invision Power Board 2 which has some mods such as a shoutbox, arcade, multimedia system, download system, etc. built on it. There are around 50 members and at peak time there are about 10-15 online (off-peak time there can sometimes be nobody online) although I plan to get some more members online after moving and solving the downtime problems. When people are online they frequently visit quite a lot of areas of the site, going from forums to arcade to shoutbox and so forth. I aim to provide a good service and sometimes install new modifications. I also run a downloads system and hope to be able to store my files here (mainly game patches and installers for games I have designed). I also need to be able to stream FLV video which I am currently doing from a free file host which supports hotlinking (I'd like to get away from there, the streaming can be quite slow at times).

The database is currently at Free MySQL.net and I often get too many connections when accessing the site, and my web host itself has many internal server errors and major downtime frequently. Users have complained and I'd like to move. I'm also limited in what I do by this annoying 500KB file size limit and have to host the majority of my files outside of my domain name.

Will the hatchling plan support my site or will I have to go for a more costly plan? (up to about $10/month is about as much as I can afford) I currenly have one domain name, and it has custom MX records and CNAME records pointing to Google Apps for your domain, which I would like to keep. Currently I am using PHP4 and MySQL4.

If you need any more information please ask me here, I am happy to give answers if you can provide some.

Thanks
tinytimrob

[raidensnake]

I dunno about google stuff but to use HG you'd be best off using nameservers to connect to your webspace. looks like you are using some wierd redirects. The forums mysql and php shouldn't be much trouble. Also you get email with the service.

[GatorChrisD]

How many sql connections did you have when you were getting the internal server errors? Our servers are limited to 25 concurrent mysql connections.

[tinytimrob]

I've asked the database providers about what their maximum is, but is it possible to find out how many connections I have at any one time from within the forum software? (I am running Invision Power Board 2 as previously stated)

Thanks

[gtgeorge]

Originally Posted by tinytimrob

I've asked the database providers about what their maximum is, but is it possible to find out how many connections I have at any one time from within the forum software? (I am running Invision Power Board 2 as previously stated)

Thanks

As long as you aren't using persitant connections, you could have quite a large # of users at any given time since most connections to the DB span ms On our dedicated with several forums and other db driven sites, it is difficult to capture more than 3 or so db connections at the same time!

[tinytimrob]

Well I don't really understand MySQL. I just use it, and I can code in PHP to store information (several of the IPB mods I am running I coded myself) however I have no idea about how many connections I have at any one time.

[tinytimrob]

OK, apparently according to the administration of the site where my database is currently run, the server I am on allows 500 connections globally, it is not set on a per-user basis (although from what I assume, these connections are almost all in use most of the time, because I keep getting too many connections on the server (and The page cannot be displayed.)

I believe the internal server errors are down to my web host and not the database (although I could be wrong)

Now, getting back to my original question, what I want to know is - will the Hatchling plan support my current setup and some potential future growth, or would I have to go to a higher plan? Because I am interested in HostGator but don't want to go for a plan which doesn't have a good enough spec for the job, and I want to make sure that I won't have the same problems with connections and so forth when I move here (because if so there would be no real point moving)

[gtgeorge]

Originally Posted by tinytimrob

Now, getting back to my original question, what I want to know is - will the Hatchling plan support my current setup and some potential future growth, or would I have to go to a higher plan? Because I am interested in HostGator but don't want to go for a plan which doesn't have a good enough spec for the job, and I want to make sure that I won't have the same problems with connections and so forth when I move here (because if so there would be no real point moving)

Only you can decide whether it would be fine. While I can only guess, I would say you would be fine. Those that run into the problems keep connections open to the db or have an awful lot of traffic. If you run into a problem with the connection limit, you could always upgrade to semi-dedicated or dedicated, but I doubt that would be necessary.

[tinytimrob]

Thank you for the feedback!

I might move to HG if I can find the time (and money).

Thanks again.