Which hosting provider & which plan?

Diddums

Diddums

Diddums

Caporegime
Joined
24 Oct 2012
Posts
25,675
Location
Godalming
Joined Vidahost about 5 years ago as it was recommended by someone on here and I couldn't fault them, but ever since they changed to / were bought out by TSOHost, they've fallen off a cliff.

Our community has grown a bit over the last few months which has increased traffic slightly. We are now getting server-side errors, and we need to reload the page.

TSOhost reckons it's because we're on a shared server and say we need yo upgrade to a dedicated server.

The jump for this is from about £4p/m to £35p/m.

I feel like we're being told porkies about the increased traffic causing the errors, and I'm also not convinced that we need to pay 11x more than our current package in order to maintain the traffic we're getting.

Any server type folks on here able to shed any light on this please?

Cheers :)
 
What errors are you getting exactly?

"23 Users were Online in the last 24 hours" isn't exactly a lot in terms of hosting/resource requirements so it'd be good to ensure you don't have some sort of issue causing unnecessarily high load on your site.

(Though appreciate not all visitors are logged in - proper stats would be helpful for further guidance).

I host a few large car community forums for far less than the £35/month they propose - what specs out of curiousity?
 
Last edited:
You almost certainly don't need a dedicated/virtual dedicated server to run a small community, unless it's very inefficient. The cheapest server on the Tsohost website actually comes with less resources (RAM especially!) than many good quality shared hosting accounts, so I'd say for definite don't go for that.

I would say look for better quality shared hosting, perhaps in the range £5-£15 per month. Check what resources your site/account can use (many hosts use CloudLinux these days, which effectively limits your maximum RAM and CPU usage).
 
Cheers all, I've not touched any of this hosting malarkey in ages so my info is long out of date, but is there a tool I can use to see the traffic on the site? I'll have a look in the admin panel later, there might be something in there but a third party source wouldn't be amiss.

As for the site itself, it's now managed by a friend (@GazzaGarratt ) who was handed the keys and got a bit excited, going straight in to the plugin / extension store like this:

tumblr_m19uuuqtCo1qco9duo1_400.gifv


I suspect many of the plugins are fly-by-night jobbies which haven't seen an update since launch so they're probably extremely poorly optimized but I don't think simply throwing more resources at the problem is the ideal solution.

To be honest I think we would be best off just hiring a developer for a few hours and letting him loose on it, there are probably tons of things wrong which we're not even noticing which an experienced dev would be able to sort for us, and it'd save cash in the long run due to not having to pay for 12gb of RAM.

I'll have a look at Krystal, thanks for the suggestion :)
 
Cheers Didds, oh i'm sure we all go abit crazy in the plugin shop when you have the chance :D The good thing is i've removed a shed ton of plugins and applications over the past 6 months so we are in a far better position than we were 12-24 months ago when we didn't get many visitors. I do think a proper dev could give the back-end a cleaning :p as i'm only a novice in that area.

WoodyUK said:
What errors are you getting exactly?

"23 Users were Online in the last 24 hours" isn't exactly a lot in terms of hosting/resource requirements so it'd be good to ensure you don't have some sort of issue causing unnecessarily high load on your site.

(Though appreciate not all visitors are logged in - proper stats would be helpful for further guidance).

I host a few large car community forums for far less than the £35/month they propose - what specs out of curiousity?
Click to expand...

Its not as we range currently around 20-40 logged in. However, there isn't much stats in the IPS admin panel other than it can tell me there is 106 currently online so obviously many more not logged in.

Is it specs for the deal TSOHost are offering you wanted to understand?

Thanks for the ideas about Krystal and Stablepoint. I think a combination of cleaning up inefficiencies and transferring to a better deal elsewhere is the way to go.

What has always bothered me is things like storage for pictures uploaded as anything is uploaded into the host directly. I've seen many other places use Amazon, etc - I imagine this has a significant impact on memory and load times?
 
GazzaGarratt said:
What has always bothered me is things like storage for pictures uploaded as anything is uploaded into the host directly. I've seen many other places use Amazon, etc - I imagine this has a significant impact on memory and load times?
Click to expand...
No, none at all.

Your site is running on the Tsohost cloud system, if you're seeing intermittent 500 errors or other errors it's almost certainly their system's fault unless they can prove otherwise...

"Upgrading" to a small VPS would be a sideways move or even a downgrade.

As long as the database isn't great than 1-2Gb or so your site should really run fine on decent shared hosting.
 
I've been with Squirrel hosting who were consumed by Krystal a year or two ago. Can't fault it tbh, just running a personal website but never had any problems.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom