I always try and support start-up companies where I can and I tried. However good their support may have been (and it was great to start with) their servers were seemingly unable to cope with the influx. I think their business model of many customers, low revenue for each, was to blame.
The servers were fine at first, quite responsive. But quite early on my sites started to timeout, get random Error 500s, random connection cuts. Not good. I went to their site to submit a ticket. That timed out. Even worse. Loaded cPanel, worked fine. My site? Still timing out. So it wasn't even a network DOS.
Checking cPanel's server stats showed that the CPU load had gone *down* to very minimal (for that server anyway) which showed that something wasn't processing its queue like it should have been. Sent an email with this information and they restarted apache - everything's working again.
I have just counted 8 separate emails in my Shared9 Googlemail label for "Downtime". That's at least 8 times my site (and theirs) has gone down in the last 40 days. The average response has been;
Hi,
Our team is on this, an account is using a large amount of CPU and this will be resolved asap.
Sorry for the issue.
Sometimes even ranging to;
Hi,
Your website appears to load fine our end and in our USA side as well. Our site shows no timeout currently.
We will run some more tests but things seem to be ok. Can you empty your cache & restart your browser please to try again.
Thank you.
One thing that does considerably bug me is that they put their own site on the customers' server. When I was in the business I kept our site in a different datacentre with a different provider and with a backup status site in a different country (US). Having your site, including the support side of it on the same server is a bit stupid in my book. Usually customers want to use the support when something is going wrong. In this instance as per my experience when something goes wrong you can't tell anyone about it. What's worse is that if you hadn't already jotted down their support email you wouldn't have been able to tell them that way either - because the address was only written on their site.
Ranting? Me. Kind of. I do appreciate their support response times and how quickly they have managed to sort out the problems. but unfortunately they were just not few enough for me.
So onto another host. Who this time? StableHost.
I was intrigued by their Webhosting Talk special offer thread which had 16 pages of nothing but praise for them. Their support times are in PST but that's ok. I sent them a sales query as I always do to test their knowledge and response time and even though the sales department starts at 9AM, I got an email back at just gone 6:30AM PST.
I decided to give them a try. The signup and installation process was what I had come accustomed to from WHMCS. Everything was going well (no, there's no but..).
The server I am on is using litespeed and it's great. Pages are really really quick. The network latency to the server (in Frankfurt, Germany) is on average 40ms for me, compared to the 18-20ms at Shared9 but it didn't make a difference, the transfer speeds were very high (10Mb/s compared to 500Kb/s at Shared9) and the page loading times were crazy, about what I used to have on my own server.
PHP and MySQL time were weirdly set to GMT-4 (SELECT NOW();) so an email to support had Tyler come back within 6 minutes saying that he had changed it to GMT for me. Now I know MySQL can't have it changed on a node-by-node basis, has to be the entire server so they changed it server-wide for me. Nice.
cPanel stats are showing an average load of around 0.05-0.1 compared to Shared9's 2-5; actual pastes are below.
Shared9
| Server Load | 4.85 (8 cpus) |  |
| Memory Used | 33.6 % | |
| Swap Used | 3.69 % | |
StableHost
| Server Load | 0.02 (8 cpus) | |
| Memory Used | 7.5 % | |
| Swap Used | 0 % | |
I'll be writing more reviews later on. At the moment I couldn't be more pleased with StableHost. According to StableHost (Nerdie Networks LLC) they currently have around 30,000 domains.
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