Web Hosting Issues

plb · July 11th, 2007, 06:14 PM

I currently use WebHost4Life for my hosting provider. My sites:
www.weboperahouse.comand www.boyleed.com barely run. It takes about a minute to switch to a new page from the menu or to open the main page.

I believe that the problem is that there are a couple hundred sites on my particular server and each is competing for the servers resources. I believe that each of the web sites on the server uses the RAM for caching if the site is accessed frequently but that if it has not been accessed recently the page is fetched from disk.

The hosting provider http://www.aspwebhosting.com claims it gives better shared hosting performance because they provide:

More RAM (4GB not 2GB)
RAID
Separation of DB and IIS

Some posters claim that WebHost4Life uses white box servers with minimal RAM. Who really knows?

If these are indeed the performance factors, then a semi-dedicated server should solve all of them. WebHost4Life sells a package for $59/mo. that has only 10 customers per server. However this is a 4GB dual Xeon server whereas others seem to be offering a 12GB quad Xeon for nearly the same price.

What I want is my pages to pop open instantly. Everybody else's BeerHouse based site opens fast. Its just mine that is so pokey.

Pat

http://weboperahouse.com

jimibt · July 12th, 2007, 05:32 AM

Pat,

I've found webhost4life to be mostly fine (prolly just been lucky with server allocation so far). However, I've emailled aspwebhosting and requested that they give me a feature/price comparison with my currect Advance Plan, just to see what the costs involved would be in switching over if they could match feature for feature. my must haves are:

1. ASP.Net 2.0 hosting (2000MB disk space)
2. Microsoft SQLServer (up to 2000MB)
3. Virtual Hosting
4. Remote admin of databases and file permissions
5. Ability to add/modify CName DNS records
6. management of MIME extensions (i.e. ability to add .flv files etc...)
7. Support for MS Ajax (formerlly ATLAS)

I'm assuming that this low base level will be quite easily met by them, so i'll post my findings when i get a response.

jimi

http://www.jamestollan.com

plb · July 12th, 2007, 10:44 AM

I got a response back from WebHost4Life this morning. They say they will move my sites to another server. This sounds very good. It also sounds like they routinely get these kind of complaints.

It seems to me that The BeerHouse site can operate as a kind of web hosting performance benchmark. If a copy of the unmodified site runs on a number of web hosting sites one could quickly see performance differences if any.

I became animated when I finally realized that the sites:
http://www.ericengler.com/Default.aspx
http://www.ecoelectricals.co.uk/
http://www.skistyle.be/
- all run fast.

Mine run very, very slowly. I think Eric Engler runs his vanilla BeerHouse site on a dedicated server. I think the Ski Style site runs on a shared server. Am I right?

If I am right it appears that Beerhouse sites don't require a dedicated or semi-dedicated to exhibit decent performance. A shared host costs around $10/month. A semi-dedicated host is about $70/month and a dedicated host server is about $300/month and up.

I will know about WebHost4Life later today. Hopefully my site's performance will finally be aceptable.

Pat

http://weboperahouse.com

plb · July 12th, 2007, 11:02 AM

Jimi,

Your site on WebHost4Life is much faster than mine but it seems a little slower than Eric Engler's or the Ski site or the VW site.

All of those sites open the Default page and the About page almost instantly. Yours takes a few seconds. Mine (so far) takes about a minute. Some other pages simply time out after a couple minutes.

Aspwebhosting.com claims to have superior performance. I'm interested in the answers you get back.

pat

http://weboperahouse.com

jimibt · July 12th, 2007, 11:20 AM

Pat,

I got an initial response from aspwebhosting and paste it here as follows:

Quote:

quote:
Hello Jim,

Thank you for considering ASPwebhosting.com to host your site!

The list of features in the hosting package example you provided do not correlate directly to a similar package we offer. While we can provide most of these features, one way or another, I believe we should concentrate on YOUR requirements. Very often hosting solution providers will list high limits for certain items such as bandwidth or disk space, knowing full-well that most applications actual usage will never approach these limits. However, just because they are advertised as such it brings in the business. Where we are more realistic and know what is needed in the "real world."

Our ASP Starter plan has many of the features that I believe are important in the associated price range of hosting options. I compare it to your current features below: The ASP Starter Starter plan is $20.79 per month (based on annual or semi-annual pre-payment.)

1. ASP.Net 2.0 hosting (2000MB disk space)
    - ASP Starter Plan - 500MB
2. Microsoft SQLServer (up to 2000MB)
    - ASP Starter Plan - 150MB
3. Virtual Hosting
    - ASP Starter Plan - Shared environment
4. Remote admin of databases and file permissions
    - ASP Starter Plan - Admin provided through Enterprise Manager or SQL Server Management Studio.
         -File permissions are not allowed to be changed. Please clarify the need for file permission changes.
5. Ability to add/modify CName DNS records
    - ASP Starter Plan - DNS changes are handled through a support ticket
6. management of MIME extensions (i.e. ability to add .flv files etc...)
    - ASP Starter Plan - MIME changes are handled through a support ticket. Note, video file downloading can consume large amounts of bandwidth. Something our shared plan types may not support. Please tell us more about your .flv requirement.
7. Support for MS Ajax (formerlly ATLAS)
    - ASP Starter Plan - supports AJAX

We manage strong control over the critical resources such as DNS, bandwidth and permissions to maintain high security and performance levels. Something other hosting providers may give little attention to.

Here is the link to our plan features and pricing page which compares our available plan types:
http://www.aspwebhosting.com/pricing_asp.htm

Please review our plan features and compare then to your actual requirements.

If we can provide further assistance please let me know.

Best regards,
Steve

i've asked a further couple of questions, in particular regarding the disk quotas for sqlserver, so will update you when i get the next email from steve.

jimi

http://www.jamestollan.com

plb · July 13th, 2007, 10:32 AM

My sites now run fast.

WebHost4Life [u]can</u> provide decent performance for a BeerHouse based site on a shared server. I think what happened was that my original web sites five years ago were on a rather small and slow server. My guess is that those servers had 1 GB RAM, 5400 RPM IDE disks and a single CPU. At that time WebHost4Life had few customers so it hardly mattered. But as they grew the old servers were filled with 200 or more web sites. My guess is that the newer servers now have 4GB RAM, dual processors, and SCSI disks. This seems to be the standard for their semi-dedicated servers. These new servers today probably cost less than the older, slower servers of 2001.

They seem to have policy of transfering customers who complain about performance to a newer server. I not only complained, I specifically asked to be moved. They did it at once with no discussion or negotiation.

I currently have four sites on WebHost4Life. Two of them are dead - very, very dead. I suspect that of the 6000 + web sites that WebHost4Life hosts, perhaps half have no traffic and are no longer maintained - or they are just brochure sites. The older that a site is, the more likely that it is dead. So they just keep those old sites running - slowly - on their old servers.

The above explanation constitutes a theory of web hosting. It is based on speculation not evidence. Sort of like political reporting. Maybe I should become a pundit.

Pat

http://weboperahouse.com

Maxxim · July 13th, 2007, 02:47 PM

plb, i think your site is better but not enough... :(

Maxxim · July 13th, 2007, 02:51 PM

see http://www.azu ljas mim.com based on version 1 and hosted in godaddy!

(don't write my url here please. Some guys had tried to hack hack my site.)

plb · July 13th, 2007, 04:09 PM

Maxxim,

You say my site is still not fast enough? First of all I want to thank you for feedback. It was your posts that finally got me to face up to my site's lousy perfeormance. However, now my site's performance seems fine to me.

When I click on one of the other BeerHouse site it opens the default page almost instantly. When I click on the About page on any of these sites I get essentially instantaneous response. Formerly it took about two minutes to get to to the default page and then to the About page on my two BeerHouse based sites hosted on WebHost4Life. Now it's almost instantaneous - just like everyone else's site.

I have a couple pages that take longer, like the video pages and the Report generation pages. But even these take only ten or twenty seconds. I am quite happy with the video loading performance from WebHost4Life. I expected more trouble. I had loaded the first three test videos onto YouTube as a method for getting fast streaming, but I found I can get good performance from wmv files stored in the site directly.

I'd be grateful if you would continue to monitor my site's performance. Right now I'm very happy that I don't have to change hosting vendors or pay a lot mor for a semi-dedicated plan.

I don't understand the link you gave to your GoDaddy hosted site. Do you think the GoDaddy hosting is better - faster?

Pat

http://weboperahouse.com

Maxxim · July 13th, 2007, 06:18 PM

Yes, now I opened your site and it was fast... When i wrote my post it wasn't so fast...

my url is:

www.a z u l j a s m i m.com

Copy it, delete the spaces and then press enter!

I have to make a redirect page...
Here, many kids like to hack some sites and make sql injections etc.. If they know source code it's easier to find some possible way. I don't want to nobody that google my url name came into this forum ;)
This page was made 35% with thePhileV1 and 45% mycode.
I'll upgrade it to version 2 with different languages!
It's in portuguese, but you can enter in "racas" and navigate a while and test it!

I don't say that godaddy is better than webhost4life, but:
webhost4life has better conditions in sql features and db size!
But my site (from godaddy) never was down and is allways fast with 20 members online and 6000 topics.

It is even cheaper than webhost4life
with $7 you have 2x200 Mb for database. It is more than enough for a site like weboperahouse (i think)

check this

you made your complaint and now webhost4life put you on top... Wait a while and see it in next 15 days... 1 month!

Good luck