Dark Bit Factory & Gravity
GENERAL => General chat => Topic started by: Shockwave on April 06, 2007
-
For what I pay for the hosting of this site ($10 a month), it's pretty good. However we have had two periods of total downtime over the last month, to me this is very frustrating, it must be annoying for you too.
Right now the site is experiencing difficulties. This is because we are on a shared server.
Shared hosting for those not in the know is a method that people can use to get thier site online when price is important. Getting a good shared host is a real minefield and for what it's worth, the one we have (petahosting) is one of the better ones.
The problem we have is that when a site on our server gets slashdotted and experiences a large volume of traffic, the server gets overloaded and it kills every site on our server. Eventually the traffic dissipates and things return to normal.
The only alternative is to bypass the reseller and get as close to the data center as possible.. Eventually this is going to mean getting a dedicated host, Ie. paying for a dedicated server for this site.
This is bloody expensive compared to what we have now, though it is something I am prepared to look into.. We are outgrowing our host anyway, eventually we will just run out of diskspace so something will need to be done in the future.
I want to apologise for the downtime, I sincerely mean that, one way or another this will get sorted out.
-
Hey, it's cool, we know it's not your fault. It's not like you house the servers or anything, it's out of your hands.
-
Thanks Slinks but it's not really out of my hands, I own the domain name and also I pay monthly for the hosting, I am not tied into a contract at the moment so I can choose to move this site to a dedicated host, it will mean that the competitions with prizes will be fewer and further between and I need to think about it very carefully, this sort of thing is going to cost serious bucks.
If this site is moved to another host it will be moved to it's own dedicated server. I am hoping that people here can share thier thoughts on this. Cheers.
-
We don't really need the bandwidth, just the storage. Our own bandwidth requirements must be miniscule. If this host were properly load-balanced it wouldn't matter if one site got slashdotted. A dedicated server is going to cost thousands to set up plus maintenance, isn't it?
Jim
-
Our disk space is half gone now, as for bandwidth we use quite a lot, we transfer about 3gb a month.
Problem with bandwidth is that once you get up to say 10gb a month, a lot of providers see your site as a drain on resources and are less helpful.
I am not sure how much it will cost to set up some dedicated hosting, I am looking into it now and will post back later. I'm looking at a provider called rackspace at the moment, they seem really good, seen several sites hosted by their servers but as you have to apply for a quotation I am feeling a bit nervous ;)
If it's less than $70 a month I'll consider it seriously if it's more than that I'll use plan b;
http://www.webfusion.co.uk/virtual-private-servers/fusion-plus-linux/ (http://www.webfusion.co.uk/virtual-private-servers/fusion-plus-linux/)
-
Ok. Well rackspace was $399 a month :P Forget that!
I'll keep looking around..
-
Mmm. Or maybe moving to Druid's host?
http://www.one.com/en_GB/ (http://www.one.com/en_GB/)
He hosts Intro-Inferno there, it would cure our problem of storage space for a few years and is cheap too.
Webhosting has got to be one of the most difficult things to buy. I looked a little deeper on the Pipex one, I was not impressed.
-
I don't know very much about this subject but i think having a stable site is more important than having cash prizes.
btv, how big is this site in GB?
-
At the moment this site transfers about 3GB a month, it is approximately 400mb in size. We have the capacity for 30GB of transfer a month and we can store up to 800mb of files.
The thing is that it's all pretty meaningless, all you have to do is try and find a good webhost and you'll be amazed at the choices, and if you look a little deeper you will see that there are lots of pitfalls too.
There's just so many bad hosts.
One.com do indeed seem to be really good, offering unlimited transfer and up to 4000 mb of storage space for the same price as I pay now, however I need to transfer admin rights for the domain to them if I want to swap from Petahosting.
Getting a deicated server is a non-starter too, they are at least $300 a month, the option I was thinking of was a VPS, which behaves like a dedicated server but again, the choice of these is bewildering.
The people we use, Petahosting in fairness have been generally great to deal with and thier uptime is approaching 99.9%, we do seem to lose about 3 hours a month, perhaps that's not such a bad thing, I dunno.
I guess that is about the best you could get when you are using shared hosting anyway. A future problem for us as we grow is going to be disk space. We will eventually need several thousand mb.
A site with 4000mb could be enough for us to be going along with, if we got any bigger than that then I guess that the next step would be a vps.
-
When I mean bandwidth, I mean speed. I know we do a lot of downloads/month, but the reason we're getting downtime is presently only due to speed overload at our provider's POP.
I thought having a rack would be expensive - last time I asked about it, in 1999, it was about $20,000 a year, plus startup cost of buying the rackspace and server to go in it! :(
I work on an OpenSource project called OpenWatcom. Perforce just gave us a server and are paying for all the costs because we use their source control software and they can now use us as advertising. It would be marvellous to find such a patron.
I'd host the thing myself, I've got unlimited storage and bandwidth, but I don't think my uptime is nearly as good as Petahosting.
Wish I knew a better solution. :-\
Jim
-
Druids provider has some cool deals indeed. Maybe you should chat with him
about any downtimes and problems he may spotted with the provider.
I am very happy with http://all-inkl.com/eng/index.php?cna=&cnb= (http://all-inkl.com/eng/index.php?cna=&cnb=) ...
although my tiny pages might not a good candidate to compare to your site
concerning performance.
hm....
-
Druid's hosts take your domain admin rights though :( I am not sure if this is a big problem or not, but I am not happy about relinquishing control of our domain name to anybody...
-
And another frustrating development.. I can't get access to my control panel at Verio any more it seems.. It's not an urgent issue but I wanted to extend ownership of the domain for a few years.. We have until April 2008.
-
Hmmm ... that's strange. Hope everything will turn out ok !? Keep us informed.
-
Sorting out web hosting is fucking annoying :)
-
Finally managed to get access to the control panel!
Here is the result :P
Domain Name: DBFINTERACTIVE.COM
Registrar: MELBOURNE IT, LTD. D/B/A INTERNET NAMES WORLDWIDE
Whois Server: whois.melbourneit.com
Referral URL: http://www.melbourneit.com
Name Server: NS1.PETAHOSTING.COM
Name Server: NS2.PETAHOSTING.COM
Status: ok
Updated Date: 08-apr-2007
Creation Date: 30-apr-2006
Expiration Date: 30-apr-2016
It's ours until April 2016 which should do for now!
-
Cool!
-
Great...
-
It means that this community will be around for at least another 9 years. I wonder what it will be like by then.
-
bigger..
-
:clap: Hopefully!