Vidahost Issue

dk345

dk345

dk345

Associate
Joined
30 Dec 2008
Posts
415
Location
York
Hi,

A couple of weeks ago I bought a new domain and medium hosting package with Vidahost. Everything went well and was set up in no time.

Fast forward to yesterday and I went to sign into the cPanel to get config details for FileZilla. When it came to connecting with FileZilla, I was simply given then error "Connection Refused".

Now, the strange thing is... I can no longer visit the site - All browsers just time out. I can't login to cPanel any more either, it just times out! But, if I try and view my site or sign in via a proxy it works fine!

What have I done? :( Is it something I can solve?

Cheers
 
Vidahost support is pretty good from my experience, quick to reply and they know what they are doing. A self hosted wordpress installation on one of my sites suddenly became very slow with no indication of what could have gone wrong. Their support disabled all the plugins and managed to identify a faulty stat tracking plugin in the wordpress installation.

I was expecting to hear something along the lines of "your site consuming lots of resources, sort it out" but they went the extra mile.
 
Perhaps I should have said in my OP - I had contacted support. I expected it'd take until next week to get a reply, but when I checked my emails this morning I was informed that they're looking in to it.

Support ticket created 10pm, responded to 7:10am the next day... That's impressive.

For what it's worth, I am on a BT Infinity connection.
 
If you raise a support ticket between 9am - 5pm (maybe longer hours but can't comment) you generally get a reply and a fix back within 15 minutes.

I can't recommend Vidahost enough, they're absolutely top!
 
Black Dynamite said:
I can't recommend Vidahost enough, they're absolutely top!
Click to expand...

I've got a Vidahost account (off the back of OcUK forum recommendations), and I have to admit I'm disappointed with the connection speed of my reseller account. The actual download rate is fine, but it takes at least a couple of seconds to start loading pages on my sites, even relatively simple pages like the backend of a Wordpress site. Just now I'm timed a page at 5 seconds before it started loading.
 
this_is_gav said:
I've got a Vidahost account (off the back of OcUK forum recommendations), and I have to admit I'm disappointed with the connection speed of my reseller account. The actual download rate is fine, but it takes at least a couple of seconds to start loading pages on my sites, even relatively simple pages like the backend of a Wordpress site. Just now I'm timed a page at 5 seconds before it started loading.
Click to expand...

Could be they aren't set up for WordPress sites. You'd be surprised. I've moved a client's site from BlueHost to a WordPress "optimised" host and the difference is remarkable. Page loads instantly instead of waiting for a few seconds like you mentioned.
 
Does seem to make some difference - not sure of the technical reasons - I've got my main site (WP based) hosted by a friend who does web-hosting properly and does it as a business and is WP optimised amongst other things and my site takes ~0.5 seconds to start loading on there - on my own dedi where I have a test version of it it takes about 3 seconds.

His servers are in the US and serving 100s of sites mines in the UK serving pretty much nothing but my own uses.
 
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Servers are set up to deal with the like of Ruby, Python, standard HTML, PHP, WordPress, Drupal...the list goes on.

Each language/CMS has slightly different MySQL instructions for getting data, where applicable. Tuning the server to work with how WordPress wants to get data and removing the protocols to handle other languages which aren't on the server does two things. One, it frees up processing resources on the server as these "programs" aren't running for no reason. Two, the queries are dealt with in the fastest possible manner. Not in a it'll do manner.

That's not technically 100% accurate I'm sure, I'm not a server administrator but, my server administrator friend has explained it to me roughly like that.

Either way, I can put two identical sites on a mainstream server and on an optimised server and WP sites on the optimised server with 3 or 4 videos and a dozen high res images per page, and it's loaded in under 2 seconds. Including running the jQuery to resize pictures.
 
sunama said:
I have a joomla website and it takes 5 seconds to load.
How do you find a host which is optimised for a particular CMS?
Click to expand...

There aren't many due to the nature of the web. Your best bet is to go with a design & development company that hosts their clients' websites and specialises in a particular CMS. Not a tall order!

Media Temple is busy claiming they're WP optimised hosts but...they've just been bought by GoDaddy so avoid like the plague.
 
this_is_gav said:
I've got a Vidahost account (off the back of OcUK forum recommendations), and I have to admit I'm disappointed with the connection speed of my reseller account. The actual download rate is fine, but it takes at least a couple of seconds to start loading pages on my sites, even relatively simple pages like the backend of a Wordpress site. Just now I'm timed a page at 5 seconds before it started loading.
Click to expand...
Open a ticket and we'll find out why :)

I have a love-hate relationship with WordPress ;)
 
Beansprout said:
Open a ticket and we'll find out why :)

I have a love-hate relationship with WordPress ;)
Click to expand...

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I've opened two tickets in the past (well, reopened the first) and once the reply was an issue with the Oregon server and the second time Michael M thought a backup might have been running, but couldn't find anything. My own scheduled backup runs over a weekend in the early morning.

I'm going to look into these "Wordpress optimised" hosts and see about moving onto a standard hosting solution (I don't need the reseller aspect of my current account any longer).
 
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this_is_gav said:
Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I've opened two tickets in the past (well, reopened the first) and once the reply was an issue with the Oregon server and the second time Michael M thought a backup might have been running, but couldn't find anything. My own scheduled backup runs over a weekend in the early morning.

I'm going to look into these "Wordpress optimised" hosts and see about moving onto a standard hosting solution (I don't need the reseller aspect of my current account any longer).
Click to expand...


I have a site that has 3 videos and 8 big images, 6 of which resize with jQuery all on the homepage. Page loads in under 2 seconds. Can give you a link to the host if you like.
 
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