I've been scouring various hosting review sites trying to get a feel of what might be the best fit for me. After reading a few reviews on the WHT forums, I'm down to a choice between Fused Network and Precision Effect. It seems like both are equally preferred by the users here, but I haven't been able to grasp what might be the best fit for a personal site. I don't anticipate needing to upload any massive media files, but I'd like to have the option. The site would mainly be used to showcase my web work, and probably aggregate information from different social networking API's (e.g. Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr).
Some of my questions I have are:
What are the advantages of cPanel over Plesk?
Is 20GB bandwidth a reasonable amount if I'm expecting to be dugg once in awhile?
Is performance/page-loading time noticeably better due to PE's accelerated PHP environment?
Maybe this is overkill for a personal site, but I'd like to find a reliable host that I can stay with for over a year while I construct my online present from the ground up.
I'm reading about the fail-over system on precision effect's site, but am not 100% clear on a few points. Their live chat isn't active right now and I'd kind of like to hear from someone that actually uses the service anyway.
If there's not anyone who knows for sure, I'll just ask their live chat later on when their awake
Is their fail-over system actually a load balancing cluster comparable to cartika's hsphere plans?
I'm trying to decide between checking out cartika, precision effect, or opening another account with medialayer just for a couple more domains. Between the 3, price isn't really a concern, since the package I'd order from each, with addons and such comes out to within a dollar or two of the others.
Medialayer has been great, and I'll keep my site with them, but I have a couple other sites to put up, and am kind of drawn to the clustered solutions for max uptime per dollar.
It has been a little while since I have frequented here, but I thought it was time that I step in here and offer up a review of Precision Effect over at www.precisioneffect.com after moving to them this past February. I have now been with Precision Effect for approximately 7 months.
I had been with a previous host, A Small Orange since June 2006, and it seemed that at least once a week I was seeing 20 to 30 minutes of downtime. After awhile, I got used to it, thinking that that is just what happens with your web host. Well after things continued to worsen over time, it got worse during the winter (end of 2007/early 2008), and I was having a number of up-time problems, including a day and half of downtime at one point (that I had posted about previously here: [url].I was finally fed up in February after I had to email their support services for a few days straight to continue to fix things.
Needless to say it was time to move as my site was growing in popularity and as I run an official message board for a #1 New York Times Best Selling Author (that I fund on my own), I felt it was only right to move to a more professional host that had better up-time and customer support.
Precision Effect is where it is at!
They completely took care of me during this stressful move from one host to another and did the complete transfer for me.
I have had a few questions here and there (very minor in nature), and they have always provided me with a professional and caring response (no matter how minute or how stupid I may have sounded to them). To me, this is a company who takes care of its customers.
The members of my site, never knew this, but one day after I was completing an update on my site, I made the mistake of deleting a directory on my server, that I believed to have been a backup file on my server, and wiped out my entire site! In ten minutes my site was backup and running from one of their backups...I don't know how they did it, but I didn't lose one post on my board!
If you are looking for a company that offers amazing up-time, professional, caring and courteous staff who will take care of you, then this is the web host for you! If this company continues to operate the way that they have for me for the past 7 months, then they have a customer for life.
This week I am about to pay for my 3rd year at Precision Effect. (Since December 2006) I've had several hosts in the years before, but after signing up for Precision Effect (heard about them on WHT), I have had absolutely no reason to change.
When I first signed up, I was worried that I would have to manually upload all the files to precision effect by first downloading them to my computer and then re-uploading them to Precision. After chatting with their tech support, however, I was able to give them a link to a rar file on my previous server which they downloaded directly to the new server and decompressed for me. They even ran a database restore with a backup file from the old database server. I could have done this myself (as I'm sure most of you could) but I really liked to see that the tech support took the time to get me settled in, especially since (at the time) I was only paying about $20/year. Past hosts would have just brushed me off.
In the past two years, I only had to contact tech support twice. Both times, I received an almost immediate response to the email (I usually email late at night) and it really felt as if they were dropping everything to fix my problem.
I'm still on one of their older (not their "LiteSpeed") servers, so I can't attest to the speed of the new ones, but my server has always been very fast. My websites are a bit graphics/database intensive and I've never had load time issues. I've also never had unscheduled downtime (a couple of times they would have some small amount of downtime for upgrades) that my "downtime detector" found, though its accuracy is only about once every 15 minutes.
So, this is a long-winded review, but Precision Effect is highly recommended!
Well it's near 12 months now I've been hosted with Fused Network.
I have nothing bad to say about them. I've been extremely happy with their service. Support: It's true 24/7 I submitted a ticket at 12:30AM GMT+10:00 (approx 4AM USA) and they replied within 5 minutes.
Service: They've lived up to their promises, the uptime is great, never going under 99.9% - my monitor is unreliable though, so they're probably up around 99.99%. Any outages are always announced, and I haven't noticed any downtime.
Price: Their price is amazing, it's not cheap, but it's not expensive either, in this industry you get what you pay for, I was expecting much less for the price, so I am very happy with their pricing structure and support for price. It can only get better.
Overall: From my previous 9/10 they've risen up to a 10/10. It's top notch service, and I have nothing bad at all to say about them.
If you're looking for a great host that cares, go for it. Their affiliate system is unique, a percentage of funds goes out to charity, rather than in the pocket of the affiliate, while it may not be for you, I like it, it's a great idea.
I have no reason to change host, or even get another hosting account elsewhere, why risk a possible bad experience when I have a excellent one with my current provider?
I looked for a few hosts around on the forums it came down to a select 3, and out of them I chose Fused Network because I liked their design and all of the reviews about them were good. Plus the owner ran his own review site, which I thought was nice.
I signed up for Fused Network on the 9th of April for 3 months, and it is now the 2nd of June, and so far I am happy with Fused Network.
To start off I had many questions to ask, and all were responded to in a timely manner, I'd say all questions were answered in under 1 hour if I remember correctly.
I asked about uptime, SLA, affiliate system etc.
Uptime was a guaranteed 99.9% and if it goes below that I would get a free month, so that was their SLA of sorts.
Their affiliate system which is not like others is you get people to sign up, and some of the earnings go to your charity of choice - a good idea and props go to them for that.
During the last month, there have been notices of any downtime that would happen - so you get a notification before it goes down and how long it will be down, which is very good IMO, I am pleased with that. Downtime was minimal.
As for site speeds, my website loads very fast and I am happy with that.
The control panel they use is cPanel, and they have a script installer, not my favourite though, it's installatron, my favourite being fantastico, they don't use it because of security issues. I've had a few problems with installatron - SMF wouldn't install, and the XMB files were missing on the installatron server (a problem out of their hands) and it is still not resolved. SMF however is resolved and I can install that.
The issues with installatron were replied to in a timely manner, I was going to get an install of XMB for free if it would not install.
Their support is fantastic, I have little to say really as I haven't taken the full service of it, so far so good, I like it.
I'm no good with reviews, I always go from one subject to another so I'll keep it simple:
Support: 10/10
Personal touch: 8/10 (I like a bit of personal touch, I haven't seen this from all the support staff handling my issues)
Speed and reliability: 10/10 (+1 for notifications)
Price: 9/10 (I don't mind it, but there are addon domain limitations for the starter packages)
Overall I'd rate them a 9/10 and I am a very happy customer.
My experience at Fused Network has been good. Now I wont be saying extraordinary or out-of-this-world because I'll keep it straight to the point.
Here's my previous review - [url].
My domain remains the same with a new one added to my account, and I haven't submitted any support tickets (minus sales) since then, but they did resolve the issue with XMB forum.
I have noticed some downtime via my site checker, but when I have visited my website all the time I've visited it's never been down. The checker I have is a free one, and checks every 60 minutes. So it may be wrong, probably is. I will have to rectify that problem, it's on my to-do list.
Last night I was contemplating reviving a project, and from memory which I found out was wrong, I was told it would cost $15.00 one time for an addon domain, as one was not included on the plan I was on - the starter plan.
I sent a ticket off, and I was prepared to fight and get one for free, I was told that it would actually cost $12.00 a year. Of course that reasonable, but I count my cents.
I'm very tight.
I was also told that the service they offer is support, and hosting is just a bell to the whistle, in other words.
Ok, back to me fighting the fee, they said they cannot discount it after my reply, they need to cover the costs. I also asked if they could refund it, if I in-fact don't want it anymore, they could refund it, so that was a seller for me.
I replied again and tried to do a little blackmailing, and it didn't work, much to my dismay. They also told me it wasn't as simple as "flicking a switch". I replied then with something witty and said "where would you like this vital $12.00 sent?"
They created an invoice and again to my dismay, I was outwitted!
If $12.00 weren't vital, the topic wouldn't have been brought up to begin with. Well touche Mr. Web Host.
They've got me as a customer for another 3 months: enough said.
For the interested: Support: 10/10 Personal touch: 9/10 - gone up from 8 because of the witty-ness. Speed and reliability: 10/10 Price: 9/10 - remains at 9, because I still had to pay for the addon domain. But it's very reasonable, how ever hard it is to say.
I've been reading more and more posts about how a quality network card is important. We build all of our servers from new, quality parts but honestly we always rely on the built in NIC on the motherboard (which are brand name motherboards, but nonetheless)
How can a lesser quality NIC effect a server other than total failure of network activity? What signs should we look for and what are quality brands? My first guess is dropped packets or low throughput. I've also heard of people saying that load can go up from a bad NIC - is there any truth to that?
Is there any such thing as a fused power cord that would trip the offending device instead of everything on the UPS outlet? The only ones I can find are UK form factor.
I had made a website which name is uscarland.com it is very attractive site therefore I had got Google Page Rank 3 But Now our site have losted Page Rank. Last weak I changed our DNS .
Can DNS effected on PR?
I wanna ask from you why I have losted our Page Rank.
when I searched my site at the google then google show it But I try to open then my site is not opened ? why
When I opened it directly then it will opened? How can Possible?
if there is a way to detect traffic spikes using weblogic server logs and depending on traffic load redirect to a static page, or load the dynamic page.
I was searching for the web hosts that could survive the ****.com effect then I researched myself to compile this list of Web hosting providers that survive it. Web hosts that survive the **** effect
I've been browsing Google and have learned a lot about how to read stats and what to look out for. However I'm not understanding what effects what.
We've increased
max_user_connections from the default 25 to 50 and max_connections from 500 to 1,000
What area would this effect, RAM? CPU? If I'm having issues with CPU during my heavy load times, What should I look to optimize on our web site? We also disabled gzip on css/js files to prevent the server from over-working.
I've also run into the Today's stats for the server. Can someone tell me more about the part:
Quote:
Top Process%CPU 29.0/usr/local/bin/perl -w /usr/share/munin/munin-update Top Process%CPU 28.0/usr/local/bin/perl -w /usr/share/munin/munin-update Top Process%CPU 27.0/usr/local/bin/perl -w /usr/share/munin/munin-update
I currently pay $9.99 USD per month for a dedicated server to host my little news site.
The specs are 667mhz / 256Mb ram / Centos / about 20-40mbit BW on a shared 100mbit port.
Anyway, I have a possibility to have one of my articles dugg soon, as It may become popular and I am wondering.. is there anyway i can tweak this box to survive DIGG?
I'm using wordpress at the moment, with lighttpd and mysql and I could possibly just make it a static http page I guess for the digging.
I think that even with lots of tweaking and serving a static HTML page, it may still die.
SO, anyway..
My maximum budget is approximately $25 USD per month, but I'd like to spend less, ideally.
Do you think I should A) get a 2800+ sempron / 2.8ghz p4 with 1GB of ram and unmetered 10mbit / 100mbit with 1.5TB
Or shared hosting? Or a VPS? or what?
OR just stick with what I have now?
Basically it will just be news articles / blog type stuff + some images.
The reason I say 10mbit unmetered is at least I know what my bill is going to be etcetc.
and i get the error ----------------------------------------------------- Warning: Unknown: Your script possibly relies on a session side-effect which existed until PHP 4.2.3. Please be advised that the session extension does not consider global variables as a source of data, unless register_globals is enabled. You can disable this functionality and this warning by setting session.bug_compat_42 or session.bug_compat_warn to off, respectively. in Unknown on line 0 -----------------------------------------------------
Please share your experience about having your site dugg.
What hosting solution will be the best shot for the traffic-intensive site? Are there any shared hosts that allow to survive the digg effect? Might a shared plan with unmetered bandwidth nad disk space be the way out? I'm talking about the Deluxe Plus type of plan from webhostgiant.com deals.
I'm hosting proxy sites on my vps and untill yesterday my proxy worked fine with no problems at all.
But while going trough my server graphs I found it odd that I had 0 bandwidth since the middle of yesterday.. I first supposed that this was due school's out [url]but this wasn't the reason I found out!
I tried testing one of my proxies to see if it was still working, but with any URL I try to visit I get:
The requested resource could not be loaded. libcurl returned the error: Couldn't resolve host 'www.google.com'
I suppose the DNS server crashed?
I already restarted the VPS 3 times including the DNS Server.
Just wondering... When I set my A-name records in my Domain-provider control panel, it takes almost 24hours to take effect sometimes, yet other times it can be almost instant...
I was just wondering, from a technical point of view, why this is. Does anyone know?
I have 2 ecommerce sites now hosted at 2 different shared locations, both sites offer same exact products and pricing. I am in the process of elancing out the recode/rebuild for both sites to share one mysql database, cart and to be housed together in one VPS.
I plan to put them both on 1 windows VPS (they are asp) each with its own separate IP but have heard this can cause problems with search engines especially google. I have great natural organic right now (1st position for 5 of my demo keywords) and dont want to put that at risk but getting really tired of 2 separate backends, carts, hosting etc..
I am writing today regarding the Plesk Firewall. It seemed to be pretty handy for quickly blocking troublesome users from *replace-with-whatever-IP-block-is-giving-you-trouble*. Yet I am unable to block IPv6 addresses, and the fire wall seems to let some blocked IPv4s right in. I did not see any distinction as to v4 or v6 in the Firewall dialog for adding custom rules, so...
The question is...
(1) Is the Plesk Firewall *supposed* to apply rules to IPv6 by default?
If yes...
(2) Is there a setting or a switch that has to be configured for this to work?
If yes...
(3) Where are said configuration options located?
Okay, when I run /sbin/ip6tables -L (CentOS) I get output that resembles the iptables (no 6) output, only... what, converted to IP6? Not sure. Example output:
DROP tcp ::ffff:31.0.0.0/104 ::/0 tcp dpts:1:10000
In that particular instance I added a drop for the 31.0.0.0/8 block (using the Plesk Firewall interface), in order to create the script that's loaded into iptables (and ip6tables as well, apparently) when one elects to "Apply Configuration". It worked great, executed perfectly, and the iptables output list output looked to be (and remember, I have grossly insufficient background knowledge in this area) accurate.
Yet at the time of this writing I can see via live traffic monitor that an address in the 31.0.0.0/8 block (IPv4) is pounding away at a website. This is curious, as the live traffic monitor indicates an IPv4 address. So... can an IPv4 address be detected and recorded from a host that is only able to connect via IPv6? While an interesting question, I was more concerned with just blocking the IPv6 address and get more academic with it later.
But this raises another question; why would Plesk populate ip6tables and not provide an interface to actually submit IPv6 addresses.
- I make changes to the PHP settings but they don't seem to take effect. I even had tried making the changes in the php.ini file, but some of the changes here don't take effect either. I have found similiar posts, but resolutions that work. I have restarted the IIS service after the changes, but this did not change the results I see in phpinfo();.
Examples of Changes Not Taking Effect:
- I changed "error_log" in PHP Settings. phpinfo showed no value for error_log. I changed error_log in php.ini and the change took effect for both local and global. - memory_limit is set to 128M in php.ini. It shows as 32M for local and 128M for global with phpinfo(). No matter what I change this to (some value, "-1", default) in 'PHP Settings', the value does not change for local. - The same problem with 'memory_limit' also occurs for post_max_size. - PHP 5.2 and 5.4 are installed. If I change the version under the 'General' tab, it stays as 5.2.17 in phpinfo(). - I have changed the error_log setting in php.ini and 'PHP Settings', but still nothing is logged in the error_log file with safe_mode on or off (set to local directory). There is a note out there saying that with PHP 5.2, safe_mode on will not write to file. - I have performed IIS Restarts, but this did not make any settings take effect. - I also have tried changing PHP settings under the 'general' and "PHP Settings' tab, both under the website area and the advanced options->Website Scripting and Security. So the 'website' settings would be specific for the website and under 'Website Scripting and Security' would be for the webspace. Changing in either location does not make a difference.
Other Note - I discovered this, because a client was getting a 501 when performing a post, which also sent an email. If he attached a file larger than 7MB to his form, the code would fail with a 501 error. After investigating, the "To" field was blank if a person attached a file larger than 7MB. Defnitely seems to be a memory issue. But since no log file, nor will my settings take effect, I have not been able to resolve this.
PLESK Version - 11.0.9 Update #62 on Windows 2008 and IIS is the web server.
my email address is being spoof/forge. i have added spf record into the DNS for couple days now but i'm still getting rejected/bounced email. is this correct or is spammer is still able to forge my email and sending out spam?
edit: where can i check if my domain/server is on spam block list? since dnsstuff's tool cost money.
I learned the hard way last year when my website (on GoDaddy shared hosting) made the front page of Digg. GoDaddy suspended my account in a hurry (and didn't bother to inform me, but that's another story). I'm planning to get a VPS account with SLHost to prepare for future traffic growth.
How should I configure the server to best handle a huge spike in traffic? From what I can gather, there are a number of factors: - Max HTTP connections (MaxClients in Apache) - Max number of open file handles allowed (a kernel thing) - Virtuozzo allowed TCP connections
This post at webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=4552677#post4552677 by Josh at SLHost outlines the defaults for their VPS servers:
Quote:
Are you referring to HTTP connections or other? By default, the MaxClients setting is at 256 clients and would need a recompile if you want more. The number of open files allowed is set to 1024 by default and can be raised. There are also Virtuozzo allowed TCP connections, which is set at 1200 and we've noticed that anything more than that should either be on an Enterprise VPS package or low end dedicated server at least.
Should I do any tweaking to the defaults if I want to survive another Digg onslaught?
