Slowness Issues [resolved]

[kickindaspeaker]

I am very disappointed in hostgator's support. I have an issue with my site (TICKET EFN-12253213 - started August 12th!!) and they are just throwing me for a loop - despite a comment by a hostgator employee in my original chat, which he reported in the Aug 12th ticket, saying "Steps to Reproduce the Issue: Was able to view slow site by attempting to browse sites, pages take 15-20 seconds to load after being opened." (normal time should be 1 or 2 seconds)

Basically after a couple of years of pretty good service, my site has slowed down to a crawl. While most of the time it's working fine, several times a day it slows down, sometimes to the point it appears to be down. I also get 500 Internal Server errors, and "Can't connect to database" errors.

When I tell support my site is slow, they tell me it's fast. When I tell them my site is down, they tell me it's up.

I used the site "http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/" to verifiy that it wasn't an isolated incident, and that site verified that my site was indeed down for everybody.

But by the time they reply to a ticket, the site is back up, and they just tell me "your site is up, everything looks normal". And a few hours later, the site is down or slowing to a crawl.

After weeks of trying to get this issue fixed, it seems like the hostgator techs simply read the latest ticket, and not the whole history. I get such replies as:

"yoursite.com is currently loading fine for me. Are you still seeing errors?"

A few comments from our visitors:

I've experienced your site getting slower lately.
I think it's been like this for a couple of weeks. Sometimes it's
snappy and then all of the sudden it gets sluggish and i get the 500
errors.
Eric

Sometimes your site gets moderately slower, but sometimes it gets dreadfully slower, to the point I give up.
Jay

I thought it was just my ISP acting up... But over the past +/- 2 weeks your site's pages have been very very sluggish to load. I also occasionally get Internal Server Error messages, but they seem to clear up right away.
Peter

In the last two days I got server error messages.
Generally, your site has been slower for the last couple of weeks.
Nublu

Your site is definitely slower. Sometimes the screen will go
black & stay that way for about a minute before the page comes up.
I almost thought I was back on dialup! FYI, I just switched to Firefox so I don't know if that has anything to do with it.
bjs

Your forums are getting way, way too slow to be useable, now. This is bad news. Multiple blackscreen syndrome, here, on a very fast broadband internet connection, whereas sites on other Safari tabs work like lightning. This looks like a major server issue over there!
pH

[GatorFord]

I'm looking into this as we speak.

[GatorFord]

Based on the amount of traffic you're getting these 500 errors are almost positively caused by your account hitting the process limit due to the busy forums. I'll update your ticket with the gory technical details, but it's loading very quickly for me right now. I also attempted to call you but just got a voicemail.

[kickindaspeaker]

Thanks a lot for your help. I stepped out just when you called... I would love if you could call me again.

[kickindaspeaker]

Just wanted to update this thread to say that I am now getting more help with this issue, so thank you to HostGator support. Issue not solved yet, but at least now tech support DOES care.

Thanks.

[GatorFord]

No problem, and yes we do care; hosting is serious business. I'll be the first one to admit that the problem should have been noticed sooner by our employees, and that's something I'll address on my end.

I'll give you a call right now so we can get everything worked out.

[kickindaspeaker]

Just got the call! Thanks so much for the personal help. We were able to narrow the issue down to a couple of processes that seem responsible for the extra activity on my site. I can now do some experimentation and temporarily shut down those processes to see if that solves the issue.

And if it doesn't, then it might be time to move on to a dedicated server, as the traffic to my site is pretty high.

Thanks!

[kickindaspeaker]

Ford, I wanted to update this thread to let you know that I've disabled the RSS Feeds as you suggested and the site is back to normal (snappy and fast as expected). Thank you so much for your help!

[GatorFord]

You're most welcome. It was a pleasure working with you and I'm glad you're seeing the speed you're used to!