Comments on: Is this web hosting extortion?

By: Tonya Witherspoon

Tonya Witherspoon — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 13:27:24 +0000

Hey Wes – I used siteground for several years and was very happy with their service during that time but recently moved all of my websites to Bluehost because of this very same problem. The move wasn’t bad and I am now very happily back to paying a reasonable monthly fee for web hosting.

By: Restored blog access and reflections on the psychology of daily blogging » Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:36:14 +0000

[...] once that was resolved my blog was again accessible to the world. Power has been restored! (Sadly, at a price of $100 per month instead of $90 per [...]

By: aluisita

aluisita — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:02:02 +0000

I think that price is correlate with hardware spesification. we don’t need so much bandwith that gives for the first time.

By: Ben Chun

Ben Chun — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 02:59:57 +0000

Sounds like you need to get away from that company as soon as possible. Most people I know are using Dreamhost, and while it’s not perfect, they also don’t seem to try to extort you.

By: J.D. Williams

J.D. Williams — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:47:46 +0000

I used http://www.cornerhost.com when I had a website that needed hosting.

The customer service was incredible. Less than an hour usually for a reply. It wasn’t ever an autobot reply, but a reply from one of the three people that work there. I also didn’t experience hardly any downtime.

Also right now they’re offering a “hosting for life” option. I don’t know how much bandwidth that gives, but if your looking to change service providers they’re worth a look.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:46:22 +0000

Douglas’s comments are right on. If you have real-time CPU monitoring, you’ll be able to tell right away which apps are causing a problem. It may be as simple as a WP plug-in. (If you were running Expression Engine, I could help with details. More likely, it’s something hammering the mySQL server. You want to optimize, cache, and trim down unnecessary processing.

It is likely that you’ll have to upgrade to a higher data plan, but it’s extremely UNLIKELY that you need to spend $179/month.

By: D Nstone

D Nstone — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:16:42 +0000

This is a long reported problem with siteground. Do a google search and you will find others with this problem.
Check out this article from 2006 which is about the same issue
http://andreasviklund.com/blog/internet/siteground-boosts/
For them to say they have only been monitoring for 2-3 months is pulling facts out of the air.

This forum post may also be of interest
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-508972.html

I just moved our moodle from siteground. It was cheap but I lived in fear of it suddenly seizing up. I’m much happier to be paying more for piece of mind (though it’s work that pays not me personally!)

Best of luck

By: Douglas

Douglas — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:04:10 +0000

I’m no web guy, but I’d think that CPU usage and bandwidth usage (hits) wouldn’t necessarily correlate. At least not the way you’re thinking.

A single hit to a badly programmed page that called a particularly cumbersome query to the database could result in excess CPU cycles, where a 1000 hits to a well written bit of code would not.

I don’t have a solution per se, but I’d look into any recent installs of full applications: WP, Moodle, Galleries, plug-ins, etc that may have created a drain on the CPU. The graph doesn’t reach back far enough for me to decipher if there is an obvious date that could pinpoint the install. Maybe simply uninstalling what you suspect is the culprit saves you some money.

All that said, let me be the second person that suggests you find another host. The Coverville podcast puts out 3 45 minute shows a week for the last 4 or so years. He uses and recommends Bluehost.

Good luck,

Douglas

By: Bill Fitzgerald

Bill Fitzgerald — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:47:37 +0000

Hello, Wesley,

Moodle can be resource intensive, but unless your site is VERY busy it’s not likely to be the culprit.

IMO, this is an unreasonable response, especially since their next tier is 179/mo.

I’d advise that you look at a virtual dedicated server; these can range (on the low end) from 20-30/month, and they go up from there.

By: Wesley Fryer

Wesley Fryer — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:31:01 +0000

This is the followup ticket I’ve sent to my web host:

Tech Support:

I need to see historical data and graphs which support your statement “Your high CPU usage is consistent.” I certainly recognize that my website gets a lot of hits. This is the first time, however, that I’ve ever heard about my account having a “CPU usage” limit.

Siteground (to my knowledge) is not providing me with a web-based way I can monitor my CPU usage. You indicated Siteground just started tracking CPU usage in the past two months or so. Please send me my server stats for as much time as is available, so we can determine if my CPU usage has remained high for the entire time it’s been tracked, or if it has spiked recently. Can you please provide me with a web-based interface which shows my current as well as historical CPU load data? That way I can directly monitor this.

I do use a caching plugin for wordpress to reduce the pHp server load.
http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2/

Because I am suspicious that my Moodle installation may be insecure and could be the source of the high server load, I have password protected that directory so no one (including web spiders) should be able to execute moodle php requests on my installation currently. Please let me know if this change is affecting my CPU server load.

Also, a friend recommended that I use a parsing web service or program to process my server access logs, so I can readily determine which files and URLs are being accessed the most and causing the server load to spike. If you have any recommendations on programs or websites to use for this purpose that would be great.

Again I am not averse to the idea of paying more for my hosting, because I realize my site is popular, but my site has been getting a lot of hits for quite awhile now. I need to understand and see statistics that will specifically isolate where the high CPU server load is coming from.

One last question: Has Siteground recently amended its hosting contract to address CPU server load limits? Again I understand this is reasonable, but the main limits I have known about to this point are monthly bandwidth quotas and total disk space storage.

Thanks very much. Again feel free to call me by phone to discuss this.

Let’s watch the CPU stats now that I’ve password protected the Moodle site and see what happens / if anything changes. I will be interested to see the 2+ months of historical CPU usage data on my account to see if this has been something that has changed recently.