Topic: My host keeps shutting down my account

My host keeps shutting down my account

hkcharlie
Participant

@hkcharlie

12 years, 2 months ago

I’ve been using buddypress for the last three years for a website to manage my football team.
It used to be on hostmonster with a bunch of my other sites.
When some of those other sites started to get compromised, because they weren’t regularly updated, I decided to move my buddypress site to a seperate host (Hostgator) so that active users on the buddypress site would have greater security.

Since moving to hostgator, they have shut my account down on numerous occaisions, siting that my website is causing an excessive load on their server and needs to be sut down.

They point to the large number of active plugins on my site and keep sending me a stock reply about using a caching plugin which I now use.

I never had any of this problem with hostmonster and I really don’t know what to do .

Obviously they are trying to seel me a dedicated server, but I can’t afford that and I don’t see this as a solution to the problem.

PLEASE HELP

Viewing 20 replies - 1 through 20 (of 20 total)

Asynaptic
Participant

@synaptic

12 years, 2 months ago

sounds like you need a good host! these popular and large hosts are usually not the best option, best place to find it is at http://www.webhostingtalk.com

there you will find excellent shared hosting – you dont need dedicated unless your site is getting a massive amount of traffic – but there are all sorts of hosting solutions there, they are the experts

just go there, look at the shared hosting offers and ask for recommendations with your specific needs, you’ll get immediate and great suggestions

Austin Nichols
Member

@fiq

12 years, 2 months ago

No, I believe they do need dedicated. BP does not run well on a shared server. I have had a Hostmonster rep tell me they throttle all BP users and so do most other shared hosts. You may be able to run for a little while but soon you will get throttled and your site will slow to the point where it is almost unusable. You simply are not going to be able to run any real social network for $20 a month.

9087877
Inactive

12 years, 2 months ago

That is really a matter of conjecture. I have many buddypress sites running on a shared servers. The only time I ever had an issue was when I used an ajax chat plugin. Every since I have used a hosted chat plugin like envolve I have not had a site get shut down for CPU overload on the server. Just saying!

Austin Nichols
Member

@fiq

12 years, 2 months ago

@shawn38 Yes I agree to a point. It depends greatly on traffic, plugins, etc. But, it seems from what he wrote he is beyond that point. It is technically possible to run on a shared sever, but if your goal is to create a popular site you will need to switch to dedicated at some point. That point is different for everyone, but everyone that uses BP should be prepared to make that move at some point and it can come faster than you think. It’s my personal opinion that you should start out dedicated if possible so you don’t have to deal with the pain of moving later. You should at the very least find a shared host that allows for easy expansion.

PS
Hostmonster and Bluehost should never be used. I’m sure there are more to add to that list, but those I have confirmed will throttle you regardless of users or plugins.

Hugo Ashmore
Participant

@hnla

12 years, 2 months ago

We have always stated here that while BP will technically run on shared hosting, a shared hosting account will not serve very well for long, these types of sites require resources and access to manage the server for optimal performance of the site, shared hosting has to place a lot of restriction on general server configuration in order to maintain – generally – a huge volume of sites all fighting for a share of cpu / memory resource.

A VPS is the way to go and they are not that expensive, although a fair jump from cheap shared hosting but it’s simply one of the costs involved in running a popular and active site that has to be borne.

modemlooper
Moderator

@modemlooper

12 years, 2 months ago

Get mediatemple grid service. It’s $20 a month and will never get shut down. It works fine for less than 5000 users. If you ever get larger they can upgrade you without you having to worry. Stay away from super cheap hosting.

hkcharlie
Participant

@hkcharlie

12 years, 2 months ago

Everyone, thank you for all your answers you’re very helpful.
I will look into a VPN or the grid service, both sound interesting.
I honestly thought I was doing the right thing, but obviously went from one inappropriate service to another.
Thanks again and if anyone else wants to add their recommendations, I’d still love to hear them.

hkcharlie
Participant

@hkcharlie

12 years, 2 months ago

The problem I have had with hostgator is more to do with spikes in processes than spikes in traffic.
I think most of these spikes are to do with plugins that are ending out mails (I might be wrong) for example, group email subscription.
Could I limit this spike by somehow using gmail to manage my mail server. Just a thought, I don’t really know how this would work.
The grid service that @modemlooper mentions apparently has a 50 email a minute limit

On another note, I have found 36cloud that offers a cloud node with a dedicated 600Mhz CPU. Would this be faster. Would this provide noticably faster page loads and help prevent my problems happening ?

Roger Coathup
Participant

@rogercoathup

12 years, 2 months ago

Hopefully the changes to optimise database calls (in 1.7??) will make a significant difference to the hosting requirements for even a small BP site.
We’ve not found MT to be the most efficient in terms of memory and processor, perhaps because of the additional load imposed by Plesk for the control panel. For our VPS hosting, we’ve switched a number of our sites to Rocket — better efficiency and cheaper, but self managed, so requiring extra work / knowledge.

Austin Nichols
Member

@fiq

12 years, 2 months ago

For what it’s worth, we use Rackspace. Expensive but top of the line (or one of the tops).

hkcharlie
Participant

@hkcharlie

12 years, 2 months ago

I have just seen that Hostgator offer a VPS account.
I am considering just upgrading my existing to a VPS or do people have bad experience with reason, with these cheap companies. (Hostgator, hostmonster, bluehost etc)

modemlooper
Moderator

@modemlooper

12 years, 2 months ago

leave hostgator. worst hosting i ever had.

9087877
Inactive

12 years, 2 months ago

Here is another consideration. How many users on average do you really have that is online at the same time? You could have 10,000 members but if only 10 of them are actively online on average simultaneously then even a shared server could handle that. http://www.000webhost.com is free and I I have no issues. But in the same respect I have never had 10,000 users actively online at the same time. You really need to analyze how many users you have online at one time to get an idea of what your requirements need to be.

hkcharlie
Participant

@hkcharlie

12 years, 2 months ago

My issuues are not with the number of users, I have a max of 40 active users and no more than 5 come on line at any one time.
My problem (besides having a lot of plugins) is when I run processes with some custom plugins they apparently use a lot of processing power to create an event, send an email, etc etc and the spike gets highlighted by an automated service on the server and in that one minute I could get shut down.

In the small print, it says something about using more than 25% of processor power for more than 90secs.

I asked host gator whether uping my account to a VPS would help, the recommended me to a level 5 VPS:
CPU 2.69 GHZ
RAM 1824 MB
Disk Space 80 GB
Bandwidth 1425 GB
But they didn’t really say why they were recommending this or demonstrated that they even understood how the website worked.

hkcharlie
Participant

@hkcharlie

12 years, 2 months ago

Can anyone recommend a reasonable minimum VPS setup for Buddypress setup with less than 50 users ?
With no more than 5 logging on at a time.
My spikes of usage come with processes rather than page loads, such as the creation of a group event and the sending out of emails to all the group members.

Quint
Participant

@qrahaman

12 years, 2 months ago

@hkcharlie,

Zippykid.com is outstanding. After you vet them, you will probably arrive at the same conclusion. Tell them your situation, your concerns and they’ll give it to you straight up.

hkcharlie
Participant

@hkcharlie

12 years, 2 months ago

I just had a look at zippykid, they seemed like they listened to my problem.
I had a look at their Q&A and found this :
“What plugins can I use on my site?
We don’t restrict any plugins that you use on your site, but we do recommend a few. If you have any problems with plugins or want to know which ones we recommend.”

I have a lot of plugins, isn’t it the nature of a buddypress install to mould the website into hwo you want it, by using a bunch of plugins.
Maybe ZippyKid is not so good, why do you say they are? @Quint

Roger Coathup
Participant

@rogercoathup

12 years, 2 months ago

A large proportion of ‘moulded’ sites are built with very few ‘off the shelf’ plugins. They custom build the features / functions they want on trusted APIs, rather than simply combining a set of generic plugins over which they have little quality control.

Perhaps you should be analysing why your email plugin requires so much ‘processor’ to just send a max of 50 emails.

Also, put a watch on your pages to see how many database calls are being made – that should help you determine which widgets, plugins, loops you’ll need to optimise.

Ryan Hellyer
Participant

@ryanhellyer

12 years, 2 months ago

Load problems like this are either caused by high traffic or a poorly configured setup. The first task should be to figure out what the problem is.

Failing that, try more expensive hosting. WP Engine has a good reputation and seem to be able to handle reasonably high amounts of traffic with no problems. They can also assist with finding highly inefficient plugins you may be running.

smartmwp
Participant

@smartmwp

12 years, 2 months ago

@hkcharlie: Hi! You may check your server CPU usage from your cPanel under the statistics section on the bottom left side of the page. there’s a small link under CPU usage that also shows the graph for the last 24 hours.