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Traffic And Web Hosts: Tales Of Woe

May 02, 2008

Hello everyone. How y'alls been? Even though it's been a while since my last post, I'd like to dive right in with a little discussion of web hosts. In the three years I've been running OhGizmo.com, I've gone through a motley crew of hosts that offered everything and the kitchen sink. After a long search, I finally found a home for the site.

In this post, I want to share my personal experiences. And to make it interesting for everyone, it would be cool if you could leave comments with your own.

Dreamhost.com
Ok, so this is technically not my first host. But the first real one was so small, it's barely worth mentioning. Dreamhost, however, is HUGE. And the thing they don't tell you is what kind of a dream they're talking about. Yeah, that's right, they should rename themselves Nightmarehost.com. Support was slow, the site was sluggish and the ability to have tons of bandwidth was moot since you'd drive all your potential readers away from having such a slow site.

Of course, early on, I didn't know any better, so I thought this was normal. The price was right, and I stayed there for way too long. It wasn't until they got serious downtime, for weeks on end, that I decided to look for a new home.

Bluehost.com
This was a definite step up. To this day, I can't remember a faster server. Things were lightning quick, and I thought I'd found a permanent home. The price was right. Things were fine and dandy until the first day I got a story featured on Digg while on this new host.

No one had told me about CPU cycle quotas! So even though I could have tons of traffic, and the site loaded fast and everything... if too many people were reading the site at once, it would get disabled for five minutes. After five minutes, it would come back on, only to get disabled within seconds because the load was still too high.

This wasn't working. I needed something that scaled.

MediaTemple
They promised something they called The Grid. An array of servers who could distribute the load during traffic spikes, so that nothing would come crashing.

Things crashed anyway. Not only did they crash on the base plan, they crashed on the more expensive VPS. See... and this boggled me... the VPS actually was not on The Grid. Meaning it didn't scale. But no one told me that. I had to find out by being ridiculed on Digg with endless Database Connection Errors... Shameful.

Plus, service was slow and painful.

So I moved to my last home, the one I'm at now.

Mosso.com
Mosso is definitely more expensive than anyone above. It's $100 a month. But for that price, you worry about nothing. I've never encountered such service. They have an 800 number... Guess what happens when you call it? A human answers! Whatever the issue, no matter what time of day or night, someone can help you.

What's more, they've built their offering on Rackspace infrastructure. If you don't know what that means, just take my word for it: it's great and reliable!

Just last week, we got featured in a bunch of places. Ended a 24 hour period with about 110,000 pageviews, a single day record for OhGizmo. And we were down for exactly: 0 seconds.

So that's it for my tales. It would be great if you could share your own experiences in the comments.

Posted by dponce80 at 12:59 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

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dew said...

I've gone through only a handful of hosts. I was lucky to land at my favorite host ever in 2004, Surpass Hosting.

I've used everything from a simple shared account to multiple dedicated servers. Overall the service has been awesome. Only a couple of short outages. Nothing significant and nothing that wasn't fixed quickly.

The support has been pretty great. I've had a couple of weird tickets where things weren't happening at first but they quickly resolved the issues.

The greatest part about the company in my opinion is their forums. They have pretty much the biggest and most friendly forums of any webhost. There are many customers and employees who take their own, personal time to help answer and solve any questions and problems you have. The top people in the company are very involved in the forums, and they're all really friendly people.

May 2, 2008 3:24:17 AM

Mrs. Mecomber said...

Wow, DPONCE, for $100 a month I hope they also throw in breakfast and Yankee tickets... that's a lot o' dough!

I had Whip An Orbit as my first host (and they do still host one of my blogs), but I had a lot of trouble with them- their telephone number got a "no service" number and I freaked. I went with Bluehost because everyone and their mother said they were the best... I'm sure BH's heart is in the right place, but I HATE that CPU quota error. I experienced it the first 12 hours I went with them. How can you run a blog with stuff like that?! :-p

So I'm still looking. Thanks for the information; it helps me whittle some possibilities down.

May 2, 2008 10:21:44 AM

Archit said...

I was just going to buy a hosting plan from BlueHost and I think you just saved me from getting into trouble! :)

Cheers!

May 2, 2008 10:37:52 AM

Maria said...

I host at Advantagecom.net, and they're simply awesome! I did write about them at http://maria.kalesanimaria.com/?p=585. Tehy're on the Better Business Bureau Online Reliability program and never received a complaint. They've been operating since 1998 in the web hosting business. A smaller company but very efficient.

May 2, 2008 11:44:54 AM

investorblogger said...

Wow! That saved me a bunch of trouble. You mentioned three hosts that I know about...

Wow! I'll be using another one, I think.
Kenneth

May 2, 2008 1:39:55 PM

Michelle said...

OMG Why would you pay 100 bucks a month in hosting. Thats insain. I have never heard of anyone paying that amount. You must be raking in the doh if you are forking over that much for hosting.

I've gone though my fair share of hosting but never would I pay that much. The only times my site have been down was because I was doing some updating and screwed up some of the code. I use now Yahoo! hosting but I also use Go Daddy. The only problem I have had is with Yahoo! blocking the httaccess file for wordpress. and the only thing i need that for is to make pretty permalinks. which really i don't have to have. I can live with out that. My service is up and running everyday. Thats what I care about.
If they are networking you and giving you hits to your site I'd double check how they do that. Some services could be using a bot program. Just seems fishy to me.

May 2, 2008 1:58:56 PM

KK aka Tina said...

Traffic is a nice problem to have :) !
How come you haven't tried GoDaddy?

A helpful post.

Here's my take of webhosting:
http://mygoodfinds.com/2007/06/01/your-own-domain-name/

May 2, 2008 2:13:02 PM

KK aka Tina said...

Traffic is a nice problem to have :) !
How come you haven't tried GoDaddy?

A helpful post.

Here's my take of webhosting:
http://mygoodfinds.com/2007/06/01/your-own-domain-name/

May 2, 2008 2:14:06 PM

serjean said...