March 2nd, 2009
Sometimes I Wonder About Shared Web Hosts
I don’t know if it is just me or if others have had similar experiences, but every time I sign up for a shared hosting account, it is just one big fail. I have yet to find a shared host that can be relied upon and I have tried many.
In a way, I can understand why some of the crappy shared hosts out there go down often and in many cases it is not their fault. What usually happens is that a user on one of their servers suddenly gets a traffic spike and blows the whole server down. If you so happen to be on the same server, well tough luck, you are going down with everyone else on the server. That is just the nature of shared hosting.
So understanding the above problem, I decided to move to a more “reliable” could solution and so MediaTemple stroles happily into my life. All was well for the first week or so of hosting with MediaTemple until suddenly I started seeing a little down time here and there. Not a big issue I thought to myself until it kept persisting and to this day, still persists. Today alone I have had trouble connecting to my databases, setting up a .co.za domain because one of the MT nameservers were down and also trouble with extremely slow website performance. Here is a screenshot of one of the many errors that frequents my website – This one happens when my site cant connect to their MySQL servers:
What is even worse, is that MediaTemple would not let me purchase the hosting plan on a month to month basis because I wanted to pay via paypal. So I am stuck with a years worth of crappy hosting. (Slicehost, when the heck will you start accepting paypal?). The only way to fix my shared hosting troubles is to go dedicated which I fully intend to do. Not only do you have more control over your hosting, but someone else’s website is not going to bring yours down.
I am going to try get a partial refund out of MediaTemple and hopefully if they budge, I am going to move to another web host. Slicehost looks good even though it isn’t fully dedicated hosting. It will mean a little downtime when moving sites across, but will hopefully save me many more hours down in the future.
Have you only tried shared hosting the US or in SA as well?
Perhaps you should try to find a shared hosting company that actually try to keep heavy users off their shared servers. Working in shared hosting I understand this problem all too well, we have to monitor servers all the time and if one goes south we have to get those users to allow us to move them to dedicated servers or get hit with TOS.
Although in most cases its actually possible to fix the problem, by getting those users to either fix something bad they have on their website (ie. a plugin with super bad mysql queries).
I haven’t tried hosting in SA before. Mostly because of high bandwidth costs and a lot of my visitors are from the States too.
I do however have few local people hosting on my MT account and will probably eventually move them over to a local dedicated server.
- Matt
I have a slice with SliceHost, and they are great! I moved from a dedicated server to them…
Anyways, I’d be willing to upgrade my slice and put your site on it, or get you a slice and have you pay me through PayPal, if you like…
Email me if you’re interested.