Bylina about hosting

Greetings, dear readers!

In last year's WordPress 2.9 article, I talked a little about the voracity of this blog platform. And if our Western colleagues do not bother with such a thing as performance (hosting is rubber-unlimited everywhere), then the quality of service of some of our hosters just terribly enrages , I want to take it and kiss it.

For example, for half a year I put up with the fact that in the admin panel of my blog on WordPress a significant part of the functions did not work due to the restriction of the hoster's memory to the stream. As a result of my correspondence with the technical support service, the limit was raised to 32Mb of RAM per stream, but this was not enough for the basic functions of the WordPress dashboard, and I only had to look and dream for many plugins. Approximately one of the four started up, the rest crashed with the same error about insufficient memory. Well, maybe not quite put up, the letters sent to the hoster so much that it is worth only envy the heroic ability of technical support to observe the icy calm. And from practical use - I received an offer to add another 10 MB for an additional fee of $ 1 per month. Well, somehow quite zhlobski agree.

')
It is doubly disappointing when money has long been paid for hosting, the hoster on the official website says, I quote:

Hosting is optimized to work with such CMS as Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, PHP-Nuke

And as a result, foreign free hosting is required, such as, for example, freehostia.com or 000webhost.com for hosting a WordPress site, where everything works fine, in contrast to our paid site. But it works for the time being , and I will tell about it in more detail.

Free hosting: Failure stories

In the distant 2006 I ordered a site for my recreation site. The budget was very limited and we decided with the customer to place it on the free freehostia.com . I have to say, there was no limit to my joy - smart hosting functionality, no significant restrictions, 250MB of space for the site, 6GB of traffic per month, which is enough for a budget business card site, even mail went through the site with a bang, while most Free hosting providers have blocked features for sending mail in order to combat spam.

It was a breakthrough for the dense 2006, before freehostia I didn’t even dare to dream of a free hosting with PHP + MySQL support without the requirement to install a huge and ugly shit banner on my site on a half-screen. And here is my personal, such a tempting piece of disk space of RAM and CPU time hung by the server software I need in a beautiful data center located in the city of Freemont, California. At that time it seemed to be a real altruism against the background of the real “squeezing of juices” from client sites from the side of free hosting providers.

But, as the saying goes, free cheese is only ... you know where. After a month or two of uninterrupted work, the site began to fall off-line very often. Almost every day. I had to contact technical support. Moreover, unlike other providers of free hosting, where the act of contacting a support provider is all the same as kicking a corpse, freehostia employees answered my letters in broken English during the day, which I was damn inconvenient to write. True, there is nothing better than apologies and offers to switch to a paid tariff, where the guaranteed uptime is 99.9%, I haven’t pulled out of them.

Over time, with periodic departures offline reconciled, hosting is still free. As time went on, I was overgrown with a bunch of other projects and forgot about this site until the first epic fail in my professional activities related to web hosting happened. At freehostia.com flew server. Somewhere in the middle of the second year of the site. And flew so far that about any backups there could be no question. The guys from California gave me a pristine account, apologized, told to reload the site.

Of course, I keep backup copies of sites, while I stored them on DVD-R discs. And since the site in question was almost not updated after development, there were no reasons to be particularly upset, re-introducing changes to the content of the site after restoring from backup should have been minimal.

But it is very difficult for me to convey in words the storm of those emotions that engulfed me when I did find the disk I needed. Here I would like to quote at once two consequences of Murphy's law, namely Corollary No. 3:

Of all the possible troubles, it will be the one whose damage is greater.

And Corollary 5:

Self-made events tend to evolve from bad to worse.

I store disks with backups and all sorts of archival information in the bottom drawer of my desktop. And when I looked in there, among the huge heaps of untouched by anyone, dust-covered blanks with all kinds of junk, one nearly destroyed disk was lying. One brutally mutilated disk among hundreds of perfectly clean and completely unnecessary discs for me with all the old garbage.

Then Bella, my dog, was about a year old. The French bulldogs are generally very playful by nature, and at a young age they especially like to be naughty.

Before that, she destroyed the N-th number of slippers, some wallpaper, a couple of brooms and tried to eat my record book (after that the teachers were very surprised at the peculiar form of the record-book). I think you already guessed what fate befell a disk with backups of sites that I developed over the last year. It remains only to wonder why this cleverest animal chose this particular disc for its unknown purposes. By the way, who wants to buy a French bulldog puppy (boy, six weeks), contact;)

At that moment I have not lost hope that I can return the missing site. My skating began in Kiev firms engaged in data recovery from corrupted media. Some people told me right away that things were bad, one company tried to do something with my disk for about two weeks, but as a result I couldn’t get anything out of it.

In general, I made a client a new site with a new design (although I still have the old layouts in principle) at a very affordable price and placed it on a paid hosting.

But since I generally create websites at fairly reasonable prices, this was not the last client, whose websites I hosted on free hosting. And as they say, the mice cried, but continued to eat the cactus. After that I stopped using freehostia services, I decided to find something new. And found: Ta-dam, 000webhost.com . This time data center in Dallas, Texas. I will not go into details, but the guys from 000webhost also did not stint on resources (1500GB on disk, 100GB of traffic per month). I googled a lot, compared many options and came to the decision that it seemed to be the most worthy competitor of freehostia. There and moved their sites from freehostia. (There were not many of them there, only clients with a limited budget, I placed the other sites at the RBC Ukraine hosting center, aka hc.ua).

Naturally, this time a backup copy of the site was handed to the client on the disk, but when the thunder struck, he could not find the disk. And he struck just a month ago. The site just stopped working without any email alerts / notifications. I couldn’t go to cpanel either, I wrote to the host about the problem, and I received the answer:

Hello,
Server # 8 has been shut down, therefore your files are gone. Please set up a new account.

And although the information about the free hosting package says:

Automated Weekly Backups: Limited

That is, it would seem that at least some automatic creation of backup copies, I did not find any clarification of this information on their official website.

I was answered to the corresponding request:

Hello,
I am sorry, nothing can be retrieved.

Honestly, the impression is that free hosting providers who provide relatively many resources simply lure customers, and if they don’t get profit in the form of switching to a paid account for a year or two, they simply get rid of the “garbage”.

So my advice to you: if you use free hosting, spend more time on periodic backups. And yes, offline sites on both 000webhost and freehostia fall out quite often.

What can I say, but I pulled up English when communicating with the technical support service, and I had to communicate a lot :) If you don’t set out to learn English, then one of the fattest advantages in favor of domestic hosting is more convenient communication with those. support, although this statement is not always true.

For example, from calls to freehost.com.ua , where my blog is being hosted, there is little confusion, since practically on any issue, where from those. support requires any action, or to which they are not able to respond right away, are asked to write a request for e-mail, which personally is very, very inconvenient for me. But maybe I don’t have to complain about freehost, after all, hosting is relatively cheap (on the other hand, if it’s paid, it would be nice if it’s better than free foreign analogues). And they also wanted my web studio site for free.

The power of blogging

So, after my last posting, where I complained a bit about the problem with WordPress, there were two pleasant events for me :

1) The freehost support sent me 10 MB of RAM to the limit (now it means that my tariff plan includes 42 MB of RAM per stream), which is good news. The saddening factor is that firstly: this memory size is still not enough, for example, to automatically update WordPress to the latest version 2.9.1 via the WordPress control panel itself, and secondly: where there were errors due to lack to memory, other errors have now come out, which I haven’t had time to deal with (like this: Warning: curl_setopt (): CURLPROTO_FILE cannot be activated when it is in wp-includes / http.php on line 1302) .

By the way, all march updated to WordPress 2.9.1! We read about the new version in Russian and English .

2) Previously unknown to me hoster GigaHost.ua gave me a hosting account for 5 sites for a period of 6 months (promo code for 100% discount).

Well, such a gesture of goodwill can not but rejoice, especially hosting now I really need for new projects, since the number of individual domains in my account with the old host has reached the limit, if there is about 80% of unused disk space. And there is not much space here (500 MB), but for five business card sites / corporate sites / small web services there’s enough of a head, just beauty.

Hosting Russian and Ukrainian, "domestic"

As I learned from the correspondence, GigaHost.ua is a child project of Mirohost.net . And I already had to deal with Mirohost. I once hosted an online store on a self-hosted CMS (PHP + MySQL) with a attendance of about 1,000 visitors per day and about 5,000 products in the database (this hosting was purchased in advance by the client). But a year later, when it was necessary to extend the hosting, I proposed to transfer it to my freehost, since my account was empty, and this hosting was cheaper, and this is an important argument. As it turned out - in vain, because on the peaks of attendance, somewhere after a month of using hosting (hehe, they have a money-back for 30 days), the site from time to time started to load for 10 minutes, and then completely took off , and to slow down and fly started all my sites in this account.

Then freehost completely disconnected this site for exceeding the load on the server (and made such disconnections several times during the following months, I tearfully asked to turn it back on, promising to immediately start optimizing the engine), although there was nothing suicidal for the server: up to 15 SQL requests per page, page templates are cached, SQL is not, page generation time on my home computer and on the old hosting is about 0.2-0.5 sec, attendance is still the same, about 1000 visitors per day.

As a result, I spent a lot of nerves, a lot of time to optimize the site's engine (but it reached acceleration somewhere by 30-50%) and there are still problems, but for now we live, as the owners of an online store, which is now less invest in its promotion and attendance is now respectively lower. Most of all infuriates that all sites in the account begin to slow down, and a flurry of calls from customers is guaranteed to me. Pah-pah-pah, for the last three months everything seemed to be working clearly. And Mirohost was good, still much faster and more reliable than Freehost, but also more expensive.

So, I’ll come back to GigaHost.ua:

Creating an account was completely automatic and literally in 3-5 minutes I received an e-mail with the data for access to the admin panel. Immediately I decided to screw the domain, and what was my surprise when the site started working immediately after changing the DNS records. Well, this is entirely the merit of naunet.ru, everything works clearly for them and the best price for partners: 99 rubles. for the .RU domain

The control panel of GigaHost.ua is standard, very pleased that access to the phpMyAdmin or file manager is carried out without entering additional passwords. And this is correct, just one normal password for the control panel is enough; after all, if you have access to the control panel, everything else can be obtained / changed passwords in one way or another.

I was immediately interested in what is in the “automatic software installation” section, and again I was very pleased with the availability of a fresh version of WordPress and I was surprised to see LiveStreet there.

In general, the impression is that the hosting is sharpened under WordPress, although this is not mentioned anywhere. It was installed in seconds and works just fine. I don’t even want to list the features with which I have problems on the old hosting (problems with upgrades, plug-ins, encoding and much more), but everything is really wonderful here, a zero WordPress blog flies, the control panel is also the way to go. I even think about transferring my blog to these guys, maybe I will.

Separately, we are pleased with Python support, everything else is also in place - daily backups, task scheduler, unlimited traffic, PHP, MySQL, Perl, built-in statistics, access to log files.

It can be seen that there are intelligent guys: they update the software and support the trend CMS and the approach to the promotion is very commendable: they read my article → I liked → donated hosting :) and their servers are fast, judging by their first impressions. Sin is not to say that this is a good hosting, but of course for specific tasks. For example, if you need to spruce up a lot of business cards / blogs / corporate websites, and in general, any other than file storage / large online stores or some specific web services that sometimes take up a few gigs and more, The third rate (50 sites for $ 7.5 per month) is very good . In general, I recommend.

On this, perhaps, and finish, but the post turned out and so is too big. I hope my life experience will be useful to you.