Need new hosting service ASAP -- what & who to look for?

M

MikeMpls

Well-known member
It seems I've outgrown the shared server environment. :( I got this little gem from my current hosting service this morning after I noticed that several forums (including the one w/ the most earnings) and most of my WordPress blogs were offline:

The following file(s) in your account are creating too many requests to the server and utilizing heavy network/server resources, which are resulting in critical issues with the server pool.

xxxxxxx/index.php

As a result, we have been forced to suspend your site, to protect services to our other customers.

It looks like your site was heavily crawled by Microsoft. I would recommend modifying your robots.txt to slow down the crawling of search engines so that it does not overload your site. You can find more information about this at www.robotstxt.org

In order to unsuspend it, you need to agree to take immediate action to reduce the CGI load resulting from your content. If you are not able to do so, you should seek an alternative hosting provider, as it appears your site needs are no longer compatible with the environment which we can provide. I am sorry for any resulting inconvenience.
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I don't think it had much, if anything, to with Microsoft bots. Due to a very popular thread [teacher arrested for having sex w/ two of her students :)] the usage jumped from 2-3K pageviews a day to > 16K on Monday, and Tuesday was already looking to exceed that. The thread itself (w/ about 20 images) had around 10K views on Monday.

Eventually the move will involve 3 XF forums and a WordPress Blog, each with this level of traffic, and must be able to sustain these peaks when they occur. 4 smaller XF sites & WP blogs and a bunch of misc stuff will also move if/when I decide to abandon the old ISP completely. In the past, one has been linked from the NY Times, and the NY Times page in turn was linked from the Drudge Report. I need to have the sites working through these occasional peaks and benefiting from the revenue boost that comes with them.

I've been leery of pay-by-usage cloud service since all my forums also get hammered constantly by spammers trying unsuccessfully to register. That must add up to a bit of expenses over time if you're not on some flat-rate arrangement.

Our users are mostly in the U.S., as am I.

What should I look for and where? Parameters? Companies?

If anything is off-topic for this forum, please feel free to put it in a conversation.
 
best place to review host IMO is webhostingtalk.com

Find a few that will match what you need, then search for reviews of that company.
 
Without any hesitation, I'd happily recommend NimbusHosting. We have been with them since the beginning, and continue to be pleasantly surprised by them every time we get in touch.
 
Nimbus seem to be earning themselves a nice reputation around here :) I gotta say when I sent a general enquiry in, the reply was a pleasent one that you can tell the time had been taken.

That personal touch is always nice.
 
I ran across Nimbus before I posted. If they were in the U.S., I'd probably have just gone w/ them instead of starting this thread. However, for the first forum to move, only about 5% of the usage is from Europe, and that number drops to 2% for the other two boards.

I can estimate disk & bandwidth requirements from my current accounts, but memory?

Let's say two of my XF forums get hammered like this at the same time and search bots move in, too. How much RAM should a VPS have to handle to serve up 40-50K XF pageviews in a day without rolling over?
 
Slavik said:
That personal touch is always nice.
Click to expand...

Aye. That's one thing we enjoy as well. It's a small company, so everyone knows you by your name, rather than a customer number.

MikeMpls said:
Let's say two of my XF forums get hammered like this at the same time and search bots move in, too. How much RAM should a VPS have to handle to serve up 40-50K XF pageviews in a day without rolling over?
Click to expand...

We've had pageviews in that range a few times, and never had any issues. I'd say a couple of GB would keep you covered. In any case, a good host would be able to seamlessly let you shift up if you find out your current server is too limited, without attempting to oversell in the first place.
 
For US-based, I'd recommend these for VPS hosting:

Managed
- WiredTree
- Storm on Demand

Unmanaged
- Linode
- 6sync
- Storm on Demand
 
Any opinions on "knownhost.com"? Their VPS services seem to be the most mentioned (in my brief unscientific purview) on WebHostingTalk.

I will be using managed services. I prefer to spend my free time blogging & interacting with other users. I get enough software practice at my day job. :)
 
Another vote here for Nimbus Hosting - www.nimbushosting.co.uk

But this time from an International perspective. We currently host MobiTog with Nimbus and have a hugely global international audience base - particularly in the USA (over 65% of our membership).

When we first signed up with Nimbus they were more than happy to offer advice regarding our concerns about using a UK host, and offered their CDN service if it was needed. I am happy to say that we never did bother, in the three months we have been with Nimbus, because the speed is so good.

In my opinion, the benefits Nimbus bring to the table, being a forum hosting specialist, make the decision a very easy one - even with our international based community forum.

I absolutely agree with Peters comments above about the team too - we have got to know all of the Nimbus team, on a first name basis, as have they MobiTog's team! The forum knowledge they provide is superb and immensely reassuring - they have even helped us fix issues we were having outside of the pure hosting remit!

I believe Nimbus also offer managed solutions too. Drop them an email to confirm that though!

Nimbus Hosting - well worth consideration... :notworthy:
 
MikeMpls said:
Any opinions on "knownhost.com"? Their VPS services seem to be the most mentioned (in my brief unscientific purview) on WebHostingTalk.

I will be using managed services. I prefer to spend my free time blogging & interacting with other users. I get enough software practice at my day job. :)
Click to expand...
I've heard of them, but that's about it.
I do see a few reviews on WHT on them..
 
Had to make a decision so I can get my best-earning site back up. Today's AdSense report is really depressing. :(

It boiled down to "knownhost.com" (KH) vs. "wiredtree.com" (WT).

I went with KH (VPS-2 with cPanel & Litespeed). WHT reviews on them were uniformly good. WT's reviews were almost as good; the only really negative one was quite an eye-roller.

Within XenForo, it really seemed almost a tie, uniformly good comments here on both, perhaps slightly more in in the KH camp.

From my perspective. KH starts cheaper, more scalability options, overall WT is somewhat more expensive.

Only negative I saw for KH is alternating-day backups rather than daily. I've only had one ISP* ever have to reload my stuff from backups, so that's a marginal risk.

They can't migrate from my current ISP's custom control panel, but they will move & restore the database backups, which is the hardest part of a transfer. That means that 4 XF databases (including the one with the loading "issue") and 5 WP blogs will get moved on day 1.




* That was MNInternet.net about 12-13 years ago, now a well-deserved placeholder, a royal bunch of losers that took a week to recover and suggested maybe I should reload my site myself after their hardware failure lost everything.
 
I heard about their specials, unfortunately I'm not in a position to be patient. There was also a report in here of someone getting a VPS upgrade gratis.
 
If you want some company that cares about their clients you might want too check out Imageleet!

Before I found them I jumped from host to host. I have been with this company for almost a year now and they do more than host. If you get stumped on something, they bend over backwards to help you even if it is to even install the software themselves. They have never taken money from me for them helping me out even though I have offered a lot of times. So yeah. They are a smaller company with about 350 clients I think.
 
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