Epics about hosting

Greetings, dear readers! In last year's article on WordPress 2.9, I talked a bit about the gluttony of this blogging platform. And if our Western colleagues do not bother with such a thing as a performance (hosting then they rubber-unlimited everywhere), the quality of service of some of our hosts just terribly annoying , I want to take, and ye kiss.



For example, for half a year I put up with the fact that in the admin panel of my WordPress blog, a significant part of the functions did not work due to the limitations of the RAM memory on the stream by the host. As a result of correspondence with the technical support service, the limit was raised to 32MB of RAM per stream, but this was not enough for the basic functions of the WordPress dashboard to work, and for many plugins I only had to watch and dream. About one out of four was launched, the rest crashed with the same error about insufficient memory. Well, maybe he didn’t quite put up, so many letters were sent to the hoster that it’s worth only envy of the heroic ability of the tech support to observe icy calm. And for practical benefit - I received a proposal to throw another 10 MB for an additional fee of $ 1 per month. Well, somehow quite redneckly, agree.


It’s doubly disappointing when money has been paid for hosting for a long time, it’s written on the official website host, I quote:

The hosting is optimized for working with such CMS as Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, PHP-Nuke

And as a result, you have a foreign free hosting, for example, freehostia.com or 000webhost.com for hosting a site on WordPress, where by the way everything works fine, unlike our paid one. But it works for the time being , but I’ll tell you a little more about it.

Free Hosting: Failure stories

Back in 2006, I ordered a website for a recreation center. The budget was very limited and we decided with the customer to place it on free freehostia.com . I must say, there was no limit to my joy - chic hosting functionality, no significant restrictions, 250MB of site space, 6GB of traffic per month, which is enough for a budget business card site, even mail was sent through the site with a bang, while most free hosting providers blocked the function of sending mail in order to combat spam.

It was a breakthrough for the wild 2006, before freehostia I did not even dare to dream of a free hosting with support for PHP + MySQL without the requirement to install a giant and ugly shit banner on my screen half-screen. And then my personal, such a tempting piece of RAM disk space and processor time hung up on the server software I needed in an excellent data center located in the city of Fremount, California. At that time, this seemed like a real altruism against the background of a real “squeezing of juice” from client sites by free hosting providers.

But, as the saying goes, free cheese is only ... you know where. After a month or two of uninterrupted work, the site began to fall out offline very often. Almost every day. I had to contact technical support. Moreover, unlike other providers of free hosting, where the act of contacting the support for performance is like kicking a corpse, freehostia employees answered my letters in broken English, which I was damn inconvenient to write, for 24 hours. True, nothing cooler than apologies and offers to switch to a paid tariff, where 99.9% guaranteed uptime, I didn’t draw from them.

Over time, reconciled with periodic departures to offline, hosting is still free. Time passed, I overgrown with a bunch of other projects and forgot about this site until the first epic fail in my professional activity related to web hosting happened. At freehostia.com the server flew. Somewhere in the middle of the second year of the site. And flew so far that there was no question of any backups. The guys from California put me a virgin account, apologized and said to reload the site.

Of course, I keep backup copies of sites, while I stored on DVD-R discs. And since the site in question was almost not updated after development, there was no reason to be particularly upset, repeated changes to the content of the site after restoration from backup should be minimal.

But it’s very difficult for me to convey in words the storm of those emotions that gripped me when I did find the disk I needed. Here I want to quote two consequences of Murphy’s law at once, namely, Corollary 3:

Of all the possible troubles, it will happen exactly the one from which more damage.

And corollary No. 5:

Left to their own devices, there is a tendency to develop from bad to worse.

Disks with backups and all kinds of archive information I store in the bottom drawer of my desktop. And when I looked there, in the midst of a huge pile of untouched, dust-covered blanks with all kinds of junk, there was one practically destroyed disk. One brutally mutilated disk among hundreds of perfectly clean and completely unnecessary blanks to me with all kinds of old garbage.

Then Bella, my dog, was about a year old. French bulldogs are generally very playful by nature, and at a young age they especially like to play pranks.

Before that, she destroyed the N-th number of slippers, a few wallpapers, a couple of brooms and tried to eat my grade (after that, the teachers were very surprised at the peculiar shape of the grade). I think you have already guessed what fate befell the disk with backups of sites developed by me over the past year. One can only guess why this cleverest animal chose this particular disk for its purposes unknown to me. By the way, who wants to get a French bulldog puppy (boy, a month and a half) in Kiev, please contact;)

At that moment, I still did not lose hope that I could return the missing site. My ride began in Kiev companies involved in recovering data from damaged media. Some people told me right away that things were bad, one company tried to do something with my disk for about two weeks, but as a result, they couldn’t get anything out of there.

In general, I made a new site with a new design for the client (although I still have the old layouts) at a very affordable price and placed it on a paid hosting.

But since I generally create sites at fairly affordable prices, this was not the last client whose sites I posted on a free hosting. And as they say, the mice cried, but continued to eat a cactus. After that I stopped using freehostia services, I decided to find something new. And found: Ta-dam, 000webhost.com . This time, a data center in Dallas, Texas. I won’t go into details, but the guys from 000webhost also did not stint resources (1500GB on disk, 100GB of traffic per month). I googled a lot, compared many options and came to the decision that this seems to be the most worthy competitor to freehostia. There he transferred his sites from freehostia. (There were few of them, only clients with a limited budget, the other sites at that time I placed in the hosting center "RBC Ukraine", aka hc.ua)

Naturally, this time the backup copy of the site was handed over to the client on the disk, but when the thunder struck, he could not find this disk. And he struck literally a month ago. The site simply stopped working without any warning / email notifications. I also couldn’t enter cpanel, I wrote to the hoster about the problem, and I got an answer:

Hello,
Server # 8 has been shut down, therefore your files are gone. Please set up a new account.

And although the information about the free hosting package says:

Automated Weekly Backups: Limited

That is, at least some kind of automatic backup should seem to be, I did not find any clarification of this information on their official website.

I was answered the corresponding request:

Hello,
I am sorry, nothing can be retrieved.

Honestly, it seems that free hosting providers that provide relatively many resources simply lure customers, and if within a year or two they do not get profit in the form of a transition to a paid account, they simply get rid of the “garbage”.

So my advice to you: if you use free hosting, spend more time on periodic backups. And yes, offline sites on both 000webhost and freehostia drop out quite often.

What can I say, but I pulled up English when communicating with the technical support service, but I had to talk a lot :) If you do not set out to learn English, then one of the thickest pluses in favor of domestic hosting is more convenient communication with those. support, although this statement is not always true.

For example, from calls tofreehost.com.ua , where my blog is currently hosted, is of little use, since on almost any issue, where from those. support requires any action, or to which they are not able to immediately answer, they ask to write a request by e-mail, which personally is very, very inconvenient for me. But maybe I should not complain about freehost, after all, their hosting is relatively cheap (on the other hand, if it’s paid, it would be nice if it was better in some ways than free foreign analogues). And they hijacked my web studio website for free.

The power of blogging

So, after my last publication, where I complained a bit about problems with WordPress, two pleasant events happened for me :

1) freehost support threw me 10 MB of RAM for the limit (now it means 42 MB RAM for the stream in my tariff plan ), which can not but rejoice. The sad fact is that firstly: this amount of memory is still not enough, for example, to automatically update WordPress to the latest version 2.9.1 through the control panel of WordPress itself, and secondly: where there used to be errors due to a shortage memory, other errors have come out now that I haven’t had time to deal with yet (like this: Warning: curl_setopt (): CURLPROTO_FILE cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in wp-includes / http.php on line 1302) .

By the way, the entire march is updated to WordPress 2.9.1! We read about the new version in Russian and English .

2) The GigaHost.ua hoster, previously unknown to me, presented me with a hosting account for 5 sites for a period of 6 months (promotional code for a 100% discount).

Well, such a gesture of goodwill can not but rejoice, especially since I really need hosting for new projects, since the number of separate domains in my account with the old hoster has reached the limit, with about 80% of unused disk space. And here there is not much space (500 MB), but for five business card sites / corporate sites / small web services, it’s enough with the head, just beauty.

Hosting Russian and Ukrainian, "domestic"

As I learned from correspondence, GigaHost.ua is a subsidiary of Mirohost.net . And I already had to deal with Mirohost. I once hosted an online store on a self-written CMS (PHP + MySQL) with about 1000 visitors per day and about 5000 products in the database (this hosting was previously purchased by the client). But a year later, when it was necessary to extend the hosting, I offered to transfer it to my freehost, because I had empty space in my account, and this hosting is cheaper, and this is an important argument. As it turned out - in vain, because at the peak of attendance, after about a month of using the hosting (hehe, they just have a 30-day man-back), the site from time to time started to load for 10 minutes, and then it crashed , and all my sites in this account started to slow down and crash.

Then freehost completely turned off this site for exceeding the server load (and made such shutdowns several more times over the next months, I tearfully asked to turn it back on, promising to immediately start optimizing the engine), although there was nothing killer for the server in it: up to 15 SQL queries per page, page templates are cached, SQL is not, the page generation time on my home computer and on the old hosting is about 0.2-0.5 seconds, attendance is still the same, about 1000 visitors per day.

As a result, I spent a lot of nerves, a lot of time optimizing the site engine (but I achieved acceleration somewhere by 30-50%) and there are still problems, but for now we live, as the owners of the online store, which we are talking about less now invest in its promotion and attendance is now correspondingly lower. Most of all, it infuriates that all sites in the account begin to slow down, and a flurry of calls from customers is guaranteed to me. Pah-pah-pah, the last three months everything seems to be working clearly. And Mirohost was good, still much faster and more reliable than Freehost, but also more expensive.

So, back to GigaHost.ua itself:

Creating an account was completely automatic and literally after 3-5 minutes I received an e-mail with data for access to the admin panel. I immediately decided to fasten the domain, and what was my surprise when the site started working immediately after changing the DNS records. Well, it’s completely the merit of naunet.ru, everything is clear for them and the best price for partners: 99 rubles. for the .RU domain

, GigaHost.ua has a standard control panel, it was very pleasant that access to phpMyAdmin or file manager is carried out without entering additional passwords. And that's right, just one normal password for the control panel is enough, because anyway, if you have access to the control panel, you can get / change passwords one way or another.

I was immediately interested in what is in the “automatic software installation” section, and again, I was very pleased with the latest version of WordPress and I was surprised to see LiveStreet there.

In general, the impression is that hosting is tailored for WordPress, although this is not mentioned anywhere. It was installed in a matter of seconds and works just fine. I don’t even want to list the list of features that I have problems with on the old hosting (problems with updating, plugins, encoding, and much more), but everything is really wonderful here, a zero blog on WordPress flies, in the control panel everything is done the same way. I’m even thinking about transferring my blog to these guys, maybe I will.

Python support is especially pleasing, everything else is also in place - daily backups, task scheduler, unlimited traffic, PHP, MySQL, Perl, built-in statistics, access to log files.

It can be seen that there are smart guys: they update the software and with the support of trending CMS, they have a normal approach to promotion and they are very commendable: they read my article → I liked it → gave hosting :) and their servers, judging by the first impressions, are fast. Sin is not to say that this is a good hosting, but of course for specific tasks. For example, if you need to eat a lot of business card sites / blogs / corporate sites, but in general, anything but file storage / large online stores or some specific web services, sometimes taking several gigs or more, then third rate (50 sites for $ 7.5 per month)very good . In general, I recommend.

Perhaps I’ll end on this, otherwise the post turned out to be too big. I hope my life experience will be useful to you.