Shared hosting nightmare

33 replies
Okay my website is growing and I had to move from hostgator shared to namecheap shared. In the first 3 months, namecheap service was excellent.... I had 2 websites hosted but I had to pull-out the first one after it hit an average visit of 50K a day. I had to move it to bluehost's VPS...

What remains now is a website that is getting 3k to 5k visits a day... and namecheap always saying that resource is limited.... I keep asking what is their limit and why I never experienced this kind of problem before when my website that had tons of traffic was still hosted there - why now?

Does shared hosting has really that pathetic 5K limit a day?

Is there anyone here who experience the same problem? I don't think a site having 5K unique visits a day needs a VPS already... I was hosting with them before with 10K traffic and never experienced the same problem....
#hosting #nightmare #shared
  • Profile picture of the author Regional Warrior
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  • Profile picture of the author namehero
    Originally Posted by silveraden View Post

    Okay my website is growing and I had to move from hostgator shared to namecheap shared. In the first 3 months, namecheap service was excellent.... I had 2 websites hosted but I had to pull-out the first one after it hit an average visit of 50K a day. I had to move it to bluehost's VPS...

    What remains now is a website that is getting 3k to 5k visits a day... and namecheap always saying that resource is limited.... I keep asking what is their limit and why I never experienced this kind of problem before when my website that had tons of traffic was still hosted there - why now?

    Does shared hosting has really that pathetic 5K limit a day?

    Is there anyone here who experience the same problem? I don't think a site having 5K unique visits a day needs a VPS already... I was hosting with them before with 10K traffic and never experienced the same problem....
    Shared hosting is just used to get your website started with a very limited budget. If you plan on doing more than 1K uniques a day you need to look at a good solution that's scalable. In years past that has been a VPS followed by a Dedicated, but nowadays the Cloud provides a cheaper infrastructure that is more secure, reliable, and scalable.

    Once you go to the cloud, you'll never go back.
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    • Profile picture of the author @tjr
      Originally Posted by namehero View Post

      Shared hosting is just used to get your website started with a very limited budget. If you plan on doing more than 1K uniques a day you need to look at a good solution that's scalable. In years past that has been a VPS followed by a Dedicated, but nowadays the Cloud provides a cheaper infrastructure that is more secure, reliable, and scalable.

      Once you go to the cloud, you'll never go back.
      *Looks at signature*

      What you did there, I see it .
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  • Profile picture of the author fantrom
    Unfortunately shared hosting is very limited and not structured for high traffic. One shared website using too much resources can slow down the rest of the sites on that server. That's what VPS and Dedicated Hosting are for.

    You may want to look at the thread below.

    Although it's directed at Wordpress Hosting, I believe it may cover your situation as well.

    http://www.warriorforum.com/website-...ist-yours.html
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  • Profile picture of the author Kingfish85
    I would recommend looking more closely at your site to find where the resource usage is being spiked - bloated themes, large images, lots of plugins etc. A shared hosting plan with a decent host should not have a problem 3-5K users unless the site itself is poorly optimized, no caching, bad plugins etc.
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  • Profile picture of the author marax
    I had the same problem.
    One of my sites gets about just 100 visitors/hour during the day.
    It was doing pretty alright with HG shared.
    I then moved it to NC shared since they were having a sale.
    After the move, my site went down pretty frequently during peak hours.
    cPanel showed that resource limit exploded.

    I moved it back to HG and everything works fine.
    NC shared is probably only suitable for local business sites with lesser traffic.
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  • Profile picture of the author Barry Unruh
    I'm curious.

    If you have a Bluehost VPS, why don't you move the other site there?
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    • Profile picture of the author silveraden
      Originally Posted by Barry Unruh View Post

      I'm curious.

      If you have a Bluehost VPS, why don't you move the other site there?
      I will do so next month... Just need to add more cores to my VPS

      Originally Posted by marax View Post

      I had the same problem.
      One of my sites gets about just 100 visitors/hour during the day.
      It was doing pretty alright with HG shared.
      I then moved it to NC shared since they were having a sale.
      After the move, my site went down pretty frequently during peak hours.
      cPanel showed that resource limit exploded.

      I moved it back to HG and everything works fine.
      NC shared is probably only suitable for local business sites with lesser traffic.

      Exactly the same problem as mine... even with little traffic, cpanel shows red on everything (resources limit reached)
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  • Profile picture of the author TallyDon
    A good quality shared hosting is good enough. Not someone who oversells. I only recommend VPS when you are employing more complex applications, since you've got to have or hire more know-how. Just make sure your caching strategy is on par and you should easily accomadate more than 10k visits a day
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  • Profile picture of the author Jeff Hope
    To follow on Kingfish85's post, you might want to use the WP P3 Profiler plugin to check which plugins on your sites are using the most resources.
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  • Profile picture of the author chinedu86
    VPS or cloud hosting will do your sites a whole lot of good.
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  • Profile picture of the author azmanar
    Hi,

    Good thread.

    Lets remind ourselves these 2 valuable pointers from Senior Warriors, so that we don't get into trouble :
    => Register domains only at domain registrars.
    => Never host your sites at your domain registrars

    Now that's done with, I have 4 questions.

    Question (1)

    With VPS, the server is still sharing the same IP number with hundreds of other sites that don't belong to us and we have no control of. We are sharing resources and when someone used more, we get throttled.

    If such is the case, what makes VPS better than Shared Hosting?

    Question (2)

    I've seen so many crawlers real or fake, spidering my sites every minute. Even if the crawlers are legitimate, I don't think they need to crawl my sites every single minute 5 to 10 times. I assume this will waste my server resources and affect my limited bandwidth.

    Are Hosting Providers looking into this matter? Or is the burden on site owners to learn methods in stopping the crawlers selectively?

    Question (3)

    Some domains hosted on a server sharing the same IP number, might have been building up a very bad reputation as high volume email senders. It is just waiting for the moment to be blacklisted by anti-spam orgs and spam filters. I assume all other domains sitting in the same IP may be affected when the IP is blacklisted.

    What are Hosting Providers doing about this?

    Question (4)

    I noticed that Silveraden ( OP ), could only know the level of "stinginess" or "frugality" on bandwidth by Namecheap after she transferred her sites over to their server. Now she has to transfer them out again. The transfer itself could cause lost of opportunities because it involves ns propagation, db transfer and many other issues that takes much time to stabilize.

    She is not alone. Thousands others are facing the same issue everyday. If we have some sort of reliable Web Hosting rating system WIKI, it would spare us from a lot of trouble.

    So far, how are Hosting Providers rated? Where are the most reliable rating sites recommended by Warriors? I've seen some review sites have bogus comments.

    I would like to suggest inclusion of one more point to any rating system, i.e. IP Number Reputation.
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    • Profile picture of the author Barry Unruh
      Originally Posted by azmanar View Post

      Question (1)

      With VPS, the server is still sharing the same IP number with hundreds of other sites that don't belong to us and we have no control of. We are sharing resources and when someone used more, we get throttled.
      Actually, Most VPS services provide a dedicated IP address for you.
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      • Profile picture of the author azmanar
        Originally Posted by Barry Unruh View Post

        Actually, Most VPS services provide a dedicated IP address for you.
        Hi Barry,

        Thanks. That is one of the way to reduce risks.

        But seriously, the 4 questions I posed were not for me only. Some others here may have the same questions already for a long time and wanting some reliable answers..
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    • Profile picture of the author searchin
      Originally Posted by azmanar View Post

      Hi,

      Good thread.

      Lets remind ourselves these 2 valuable pointers from Senior Warriors, so that we don't get into trouble :
      => Register domains only at domain registrars.
      => Never host your sites at your domain registrars

      Now that's done with, I have 4 questions.

      Question (1)

      With VPS, the server is still sharing the same IP number with hundreds of other sites that don't belong to us and we have no control of. We are sharing resources and when someone used more, we get throttled.

      If such is the case, what makes VPS better than Shared Hosting?

      Question (2)

      I've seen so many crawlers real or fake, spidering my sites every minute. Even if the crawlers are legitimate, I don't think they need to crawl my sites every single minute 5 to 10 times. I assume this will waste my server resources and affect my limited bandwidth.

      Are Hosting Providers looking into this matter? Or is the burden on site owners to learn methods in stopping the crawlers selectively?

      Question (3)

      Some domains hosted on a server sharing the same IP number, might have been building up a very bad reputation as high volume email senders. It is just waiting for the moment to be blacklisted by anti-spam orgs and spam filters. I assume all other domains sitting in the same IP may be affected when the IP is blacklisted.

      What are Hosting Providers doing about this?

      Question (4)

      I noticed that Silveraden ( OP ), could only know the level of "stinginess" or "frugality" on bandwidth by Namecheap after she transferred her sites over to their server. Now she has to transfer them out again. The transfer itself could cause lost of opportunities because it involves ns propagation, db transfer and many other issues that takes much time to stabilize.

      She is not alone. Thousands others are facing the same issue everyday. If we have some sort of reliable Web Hosting rating system WIKI, it would spare us from a lot of trouble.

      So far, how are Hosting Providers rated? Where are the most reliable rating sites recommended by Warriors? I've seen some review sites have bogus comments.

      I would like to suggest inclusion of one more point to any rating system, i.e. IP Number Reputation.
      The thing is, most people don't even know they'd be running into this problem until after it happens. Most people tend to go with the cheapest advertised hosting provider that promises UNLIMITED hosting.
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  • Profile picture of the author rhinocl
    What I'm wondering if one of your sites was getting 50K visites (but we need to talk about unique real visitors not bot traffic) why everything is not already on a dedicated server. If you are getting that much traffic and not making enough to buy dedicated managed hosting then I'm guessing there is either a targeting problem or that you need to hire a copywriter?
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    • Profile picture of the author Kingfish85
      Originally Posted by rhinocl View Post

      What I'm wondering if one of your sites was getting 50K visites (but we need to talk about unique real visitors not bot traffic) why everything is not already on a dedicated server. If you are getting that much traffic and not making enough to buy dedicated managed hosting then I'm guessing there is either a targeting problem or that you need to hire a copywriter?


      What is the reason behind this? A high volume of traffic does not mean you need a physical server, or in a lot of cases even a VM. OP says "3-5K" daily, which is well within the realm of shared hosting.
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  • Profile picture of the author Sandakelum
    Originally Posted by silveraden View Post

    Okay my website is growing and I had to move from hostgator shared to namecheap shared. In the first 3 months, namecheap service was excellent.... I had 2 websites hosted but I had to pull-out the first one after it hit an average visit of 50K a day. I had to move it to bluehost's VPS...

    What remains now is a website that is getting 3k to 5k visits a day... and namecheap always saying that resource is limited.... I keep asking what is their limit and why I never experienced this kind of problem before when my website that had tons of traffic was still hosted there - why now?

    Does shared hosting has really that pathetic 5K limit a day?

    Is there anyone here who experience the same problem? I don't think a site having 5K unique visits a day needs a VPS already... I was hosting with them before with 10K traffic and never experienced the same problem....
    Why don't you move both sites to the VPS?
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  • Profile picture of the author searchin
    I wouldn't recommend VPS. I've tried that and it's basically the same as shared hosting in terms of processing resources. Virtual Servers are really meant to solve bandwidth issues, not processor/RAM issues. In my experience, high traffic dynamic websites are processor & RAM intensive, not bandwidth intensive since that could easily be solved by enabling compression. If you're not very techy then I would recommend a dedicated server because it's a lot easier to configure & manage than AWS cloud servers.
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  • Profile picture of the author vishwa
    You may go with managed VPS and if you are using WordPress than you might also try managed WordPress hosting by kinsta.
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    Techbizmasters.com- Blogging, Technology, and Digital Marketing
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  • Profile picture of the author ragstworiches
    I've had a few server issues with resources. I've found vidahost the best company to deal with. You may be ok on shared (either cpanel or cloud), your traffic doesn't seem that extreme (although it depends what they are doing on your site). The idea of cloud its supposed to cope with peaks in traffic.
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  • Profile picture of the author silveraden
    Hmmm, this thread is a little bit outdated. I already moved to VPS several months ago and never had any problem since then. Thanks for all the suggestions....
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    • Profile picture of the author silveraden
      Originally Posted by TrafficFlow View Post

      Who did you pick for VPS hosting?
      Bluehost, and the performance has been superb so far. Another thing that attracts me is that, they accept monthly payment (not subscription)
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  • Profile picture of the author awww1some
    I would go to the the fastest and best hosting i know of.
    A2 hosting. They have incredible speed and service.
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  • Profile picture of the author PassiveIncomes
    Originally Posted by silveraden View Post

    Okay my website is growing and I had to move from hostgator shared to namecheap shared. In the first 3 months, namecheap service was excellent.... I had 2 websites hosted but I had to pull-out the first one after it hit an average visit of 50K a day. I had to move it to bluehost's VPS...

    What remains now is a website that is getting 3k to 5k visits a day... and namecheap always saying that resource is limited.... I keep asking what is their limit and why I never experienced this kind of problem before when my website that had tons of traffic was still hosted there - why now?

    Does shared hosting has really that pathetic 5K limit a day?

    Is there anyone here who experience the same problem? I don't think a site having 5K unique visits a day needs a VPS already... I was hosting with them before with 10K traffic and never experienced the same problem....
    It is time to switch to dedicated server! 50k a day you can earn more than $1000+ a month very easily.
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    • Profile picture of the author searchin
      Originally Posted by PassiveIncomes View Post

      It is time to switch to dedicated server! 50k a day you can earn more than $1000+ a month very easily.
      Agreed.
      I increased my ad revenue by at-least 25% for the month so far by switching to dedicated hosting.
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  • Profile picture of the author talking
    Use services from a2hosting.com, they are able to satisfy the needs of many IT users.
    Support is helpful around the clock.
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  • Profile picture of the author jeffatrackaid
    Don't forget to backup. Don't forget to update.

    I've dealt with many horror stories where people had moved from shared to VPS/Cloud/Dedicated.

    Many budget dedicated hosting providers (which is 99% of the market despite what they label their services) do not manage the systems well.

    For example, I've seen companies that include backups but you must set them up. I deal with a case recently where someone came to us to help with disaster recovery. I asked about backups and they said, "Yes we have backups." When I checked the backups they were empty. I asked the hosting provider and they said, "Yes we provide backups but you have to manage them." Notably, this was a "managed server".

    I've also dealt with some security issues where the server has been fully compromised because the OS or control panel (Plesk, WHM) had been exploited. If you don't have the budget to have full management, then consider hiring someone from time to time to do a checkup.

    People often focus too much on the technical details or cost from moving from shared to vps to dedicated. Instead, treat your hosting environment as insurance. The better managed your systems are the less likely you are to suffer a major outage.

    Many of the hosting firms mention on these forums will take 1-3 days to recover a failed dedicated server. If you lack a good backup and recovery strategy, you could be down for a week.

    If your sites are earning you $1000's per month, then being down for a week could be far more expensive than paying a few hundred extra for your hosting.
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    • Profile picture of the author rhinocl
      I'd like to add a comment about deciding on your backup procedures- no backup system is complete until you have tried to restore a site from a backup. Take your test site (you do have a test site don't you) and mess it up. Now see if you can restore it from your backups. I am also a big believer that one of your backups should be elsewhere than in your hosting account on the same server as your site.
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    • Profile picture of the author searchin
      Originally Posted by jeffatrackaid View Post

      Don't forget to backup. Don't forget to update.

      I've dealt with many horror stories where people had moved from shared to VPS/Cloud/Dedicated.

      Many budget dedicated hosting providers (which is 99% of the market despite what they label their services) do not manage the systems well.

      For example, I've seen companies that include backups but you must set them up. I deal with a case recently where someone came to us to help with disaster recovery. I asked about backups and they said, "Yes we have backups." When I checked the backups they were empty. I asked the hosting provider and they said, "Yes we provide backups but you have to manage them." Notably, this was a "managed server".

      I've also dealt with some security issues where the server has been fully compromised because the OS or control panel (Plesk, WHM) had been exploited. If you don't have the budget to have full management, then consider hiring someone from time to time to do a checkup.

      People often focus too much on the technical details or cost from moving from shared to vps to dedicated. Instead, treat your hosting environment as insurance. The better managed your systems are the less likely you are to suffer a major outage.

      Many of the hosting firms mention on these forums will take 1-3 days to recover a failed dedicated server. If you lack a good backup and recovery strategy, you could be down for a week.

      If your sites are earning you $1000's per month, then being down for a week could be far more expensive than paying a few hundred extra for your hosting.
      Excellent advice. Thank you!
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  • Profile picture of the author PassiveIncomes
    It is really pathetic! 50k a day you can just bank in $$$ easily!
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  • Profile picture of the author linux7802
    Originally Posted by silveraden View Post

    Okay my website is growing and I had to move from hostgator shared to namecheap shared. In the first 3 months, namecheap service was excellent.... I had 2 websites hosted but I had to pull-out the first one after it hit an average visit of 50K a day. I had to move it to bluehost's VPS...

    What remains now is a website that is getting 3k to 5k visits a day... and namecheap always saying that resource is limited.... I keep asking what is their limit and why I never experienced this kind of problem before when my website that had tons of traffic was still hosted there - why now?

    Does shared hosting has really that pathetic 5K limit a day?

    Is there anyone here who experience the same problem? I don't think a site having 5K unique visits a day needs a VPS already... I was hosting with them before with 10K traffic and never experienced the same problem....
    Actually no hosting company can restrict website on traffic base, basically every hosting company having specific resources allocation to every single shared hosting account to provide stable performance to every single shared server client hosted on shared server, resources restriction means number of RAM and cpu usage by single shared hosting account.
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