I am angry with foo Host !

Never would I want to be so pretentious on this decision but yes, I am sincere about this, dreamhost is the worst one I ever tried.

I ask you to judge my judgement after reading my story carefully. ( plz )

It has been 9 months since I am hosted in DH. There about 15000 members and increasing 100-150 members day by day. And my forum started to give error messages over and over. Sometimes it didn't open, sometimes it did but as slowly as a dead. Each time I mailed my situation to DH, they answered with sorries and reboots. However , this month , with the death slows and page doesn't open errors, I started to send mails to DH just to tell about my host situation. Once they edited my .htaccess file and denied all ip addresses. Is that the solution ? I ask here now, denying all ip adresses is the solution for DH. And they answer like that : Your site is too popular for DH.

With 15000 members and 200 guest each 15 minutes ? Is this too popular for DH ? Then leave this job , I am sure I could do better with no stuff.

DH gives 500 gb of host with 5 tb of band or whatever. Who cares ? Everyone knows that no one will use so much and this is not the most important factor in hosting. What about cpu , slow or not ,servers, talk about these with us. If the machines you have do not carry a site with 15000 members, to whom will you attribute this failure ?

One more thing, nowadays the responses I get from DH is a bit reckless. Some example response quotes I got recently when I asked the reason why my site didn't open :

"I personally hate it when i cant find a cause of a problem, like in this situation. :( "

"Well sadly, it looks like your forum is just too popular for our server.
Its single handedly causing a 25 load on her, enough that other people on
your shared server are complaining about it. Sadly i had to disable your
forums to bring the load back to normal."

Other people which share the same machine with me also complain and they complain because of me ???

I can't stand any unfairness and this blame is also not fair.

I will respect any answers blaming me or DH for this post. I got blamed enough already, it doesnt matter much really.

Some sites just generate too much traffic for a shared host ... it's unfortunate, but it is true.

A SMF installation that has that level of traffic could easily cripple a shared server - and I'm not the only one who feels that way.

Have you considered using a DreamHost VPS (http://dreamhostps.com)? I'm not sure that even that would handle your site gracefully, but it's a less expensive thing to try than a full dedicated server.

--rlparker

Thank you for quick response. A vps is too luxury for me I guess. And such a small forum shouldn't have required a vps. I wonder what would happen with a forum with one hundred thousand members.Actually surely it will, so I also want to be sure that even if I consider a vps, it will undoubtfully meet my needs. When the members increase up to one hundred thousand, will they ask me to change host ? For this what should I read ? Any resources ? Thanks !

In reply to:
And such a small forum shouldn't have required a vps. I wonder what would happen with a forum with one hundred thousand members.Actually surely it will, so I also want to be sure that even if I consider a vps, it will undoubtfully meet my needs. When the members increase up to one hundred thousand, will they ask me to change host ?

"Shouldn't" isn't really a term that leads to solutions in my experience. World peace shouldn't be such an unreachable goal, we should all be able to get along. Microsoft shouldn't need to make IE 6 and 7 non-compliant with standards. It shouldn't have taken a crisis to identify that making negative amortization loans to a lot of people who can't afford the homes they wanted to buy was a bad idea...

Your forum requires the amount of resources that it requires. You can work on reducing the amount of resources it takes through careful configuration or recoding or you can get more horsepower to host it. There aren't really that many other options.

Forums tend to be pretty resource intensive - particularly if people do a lot of searches. One option you should consider is getting Dreamhost PS. It really does give you a better idea of the amount of resources that your site consumes. I bet you'd be very surprised at how much of a VPS you'd have to buy to host your site.

At any rate, good luck at your new home!

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Please have a look at the point you are locked ! Should or shouldn't, I didn't know that grammer lessons were taught here. From now on, I will redound my visits to DH discussion forum in order to improve my english , sorry for that !

Back to case, I already had required opitimization on my forum. It doesn't have any exaggerative mods installed. I am actually afraid of adding anything new. It is like a prison now. No difference really.

What I mean ?

With 15000 members , it requires VPS, what about the post-after process ? What about when the member number increase.

What I am expecting ?

At least no vps till one hundred thousands members and then additional vps , servers etc optional. Is this too much really? If I am wrong then I am sorry, but plz explain where I do wrong without including my word choice mistakes, if you will ! Pls.

Thanks

In reply to:
Your forum requires the amount of resources that it requires.

Nice one. Remember that you are on a shared server. If your site requires more resources, you should consider how to manager resources but not to blame DH. DH does offer solutions like PS or VPS or Dedicated server.

If you are in a bus, don't expect it is fast.

I'm sorry you've experienced problems with your website on one of our shared servers. As a few others have stated you certainly can out grow a shared server, even if you aren't hitting your bandwidth/space limits. This is often due to poor optimization, or too much traffic. You say you can't afford a VPS at this time, but have you looked into optimizing your forums? I bet you have some rather nasty MySQL calls! This is fairly common, especially from forums and their search functions.

If you'd like, you can open a ticket from within your Panel or email support@dreamhost.com with the specific request of MySQL optimizations. We can then pass this onto one of our MySQL guru's who can look at how your site interacts with the database and make suggestions or quite possibly run some optimizations on your tables.

- Greg
- DreamHost Technical Support

I think an "inconvenient truth" in many situations like this is that many DreamHost customers have never really thought through, or just don't understand, the infrastructure that is required to handle a busy forum.

The ease with which they can install and *try* to run such a thing on a DH shared server leads to frustration when the reality of it all starts to set in.

Seriously, to even begin to think that you could support an active forum with 15,000 users on a $10.00 a month shared host indicates to me a basic lack of understanding of what is involved.

--rlparker

In reply to:
Seriously, to even begin to think that you could support an active forum with 15,000 users on a $10.00 a month shared host indicates to me a basic lack of understanding of what is involved.

I agree 100%.

Hi

I really appreciate your responses for you want to be helpful, I am really thankful to you. I have to rethink about the vps and make a quick start with it and I will.

Thanks all to you. And I am sorry for my cruel start.

rlparker, I do agree with you, but I like to give the benefit of the doubt. A lot of people don't understand how hosting works, and this isn't their fault by any means. After all, it can be very complex. :D

I do agree that most people expect too much from hosting, especially when they're paying $6 or $10 per month. Not that our low prices reflect poor service, but just that you can't host the worlds most popular adult site for $6 a month.

- Greg
- DreamHost Technical Support

Haha, at least your forums are retaining some functionality.

One of my favorite sites, conquerclub.com, has 190,000 users, and not only are they still using a web host, but their server recently crashed and the site was down for a couple of days. Whoops!

In reply to:
A lot of people don't understand how hosting works, and this isn't their fault by any means. After all, it can be very complex. :D

That's true, and I also believe in giving folks the benefit of the doubt. What I don't think is fair, or accurate, is for posters to represent that their problems are the result of some failing on DreamHost's part when they are actually trying to run a site on a shared server that has no business operating in that environment.

In reply to:
I do agree that most people expect too much from hosting, especially when they're paying $6 or $10 per month. Not that our low prices reflect poor service, but just that you can't host the worlds most popular adult site for $6 a month.

That is pretty much the point I was trying to make.

I did not mean to sound harsh or insensitive to the original poster, but, at some point, people need to understand that they can't reasonably some very run heavily trafficked interactive forums this cheaply ... You can''t run Ebay, YouTube or WebHostingTalk for a few coins a day on a shared server (even if your traffic might fit within a "generous" bandwidth or disk storage quota)... you haven't invested in sufficient processing and server resources to do that! wink

--rlparker

In reply to:
What I don't think is fair, or accurate, is for posters to represent that their problems are the result of some failing on DreamHost's part when they are actually trying to run a site on a shared server that has no business operating in that environment.

Besides, these are the same people who are bringing the servers to a crawl for all the "regular" people!

Actually, the OP seems to have realized that they may need to rethink their conclusion and actually go for some big iron. Good for them!

Use the 3DOM50 promo code for 3 extra lifetime domains and $50 off
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That was good rlparker, my site can't even be a nail of youtube lol :)

Now I am trying to understand all from start

I want to ask just a question !

Does a website need a vps or some special servers, but with 15000 members and a traffic of about 200 guests in 15 minutes... Is this a really popular website?

( smf board as you know )

In reply to:
That was good rlparker, my site can't even be a nail of youtube lol :)

Well, of course, I was exaggerating to make a point ... sure, your site is not a "YouTube", but it is all relative. wink

In reply to:
Does a website need a vps or some special servers, but with 15000 members and a traffic of about 200 guests in 15 minutes... Is this a really popular website?

Again, "popular" is a relative term, and probably not a good one to use except in a general sense, but a site such as yours *might* need a VPS ) or even a dedicated server) depending quite a bit on what those users are doing.

Actually, DreamHost has pretty much already answered your question by pointing out that your server was being overloaded by your site. smile

--rlparker

In reply to:
Does a website need a vps or some special servers, but with 15000 members and a traffic of about 200 guests in 15 minutes... Is this a really popular website?

Popular is not the correct term.

The real questions are, how many pageviews of the various types is your site generating? If your site is purely a forum with no media downloads, that comes down to:
1. How many forum searches does it handle per unit time?
2. How many thread views does it handle per unit time?
3. How many forum views does it handle per unit time?
4. How many front page views does it handle per unit time?
5. How much CPU/memory/DB use does each of these views take?

For each of these, do an average and peak analysis to figure out:
1. How big of a server do you need to handle peak load.
2. What percentage of a server are you taking, average.
3. How long are the peaks?

Compare the answers to the size of the Dreamhost shared server you're on now. If the peaks use any significant percentage of the total load for any significant amount of time, you're overloading your shared hosting. If your average usage is using a significant part of the server, you're also probably overloading your account, but in a less acute way.

You have two solutions at this point - reduce the resources taken by the hot spots / bottlenecks or move to dedicated or VPS hosting (or Dreamhost's mostly better version of VPS, Dreamhost PS).

Use the 3DOM50 promo code for 3 extra lifetime domains and $50 off
More Dreamhost coupons here!

<quote>One of my favorite sites, conquerclub.com, has 190,000 users, and not only are they still using a web host, but their server recently crashed and the site was down for a couple of days. Whoops</quote>

"still using A webhost" says nothing at all.
That site is hosted at rackspace.com. That is not a shared webhost. I can almost guarantee that a site serving 1200 concurrent users and 190k members is not gonna be hosted on a shared host for 10 bucks a month.

@OP : 15000 users and hundreds of online users in most popular forum software packages is, quite frankly, a lot, especially for shared hosting. If you feel that this is not true, then sorry, but you are wrong.
You mention that your sites got disabled -- after your site let the server load climb to 25, by itself. This alone should be enough information for you -- not only is the site trying to use roughly 25 times as much power as the entire server has, but it also isn't the only site on the server. Even if your server was dedicated, you'd have a load of 25 on it. That kind of stuff is never going to work on a shared hosting server. And yes, disabling it is the answer -- since you are not the only one on that server, and all the others have to deal with a load of 25 due to you. That's not fair to them.

(and yes, it's entirely possible to use up 5tb of traffic without letting the server load rise too much -- but then again, those pages would not be highly dynamic ;)