Advice on Auction Site

I've been setting up an Auction site, at the moment I'm just modding it and making sure all the functions work etc.. the problem I have is that after the specified work on Atlantic the other day my site has become unresponsive several times and is currently down now.

This is not going to be good practice if there are people waiting to bid on items, or have items listed that are finishing. I must admit I haven't had a great deal of issues with Dreamhost, but I'm wondering about the speeds and downtime for this kind of site.

atlantic notice Your web server has been rebooted in the last week. help
atlantic notice Your web server did not respond to our tests. help

Reply from 64.111.125.154: bytes=32 time=162ms TTL=39
Reply from 64.111.125.154: bytes=32 time=157ms TTL=39
Reply from 64.111.125.154: bytes=32 time=157ms TTL=39
Reply from 64.111.125.154: bytes=32 time=159ms TTL=39

If your auction site is critical for your business, I strongly suggest that you find dedicated hosting for it. Otherwise, you're going to have some *very* unhappy customers when there's an outage right at the close of an auction.

For the *most* part, my site is in the 99% uptime range, which is great since it's just a hobby site. I'm not making any money off of it. I hope you plan on making enough money on your auction site to be able to afford more robust hosting.

-Scott

Yeah I understand what your saying, but then what you are also saying is that Dreamhost is only viable for personal website and anything that doesn't rely on 99.9% uptime.

I must say I'm a bit disappointed, I have a number of sites running and have only put a lot of effort into this one as hopefully it will make some money.

Maybe a private server is the answer.. but then I don't think you can change over a site to a private server once it's already up and running can you?

I'd agree with getting a dedicated server if it's anything important or that you expect to quickly grow.

Even a minute of downtime with an auction site can lead to a bunch of sellers complaining that you screwed them out of a bigger sale and buyers complaining they missed a last-minute deal because it went down as they hit the bid button.

No matter which way you go, make sure you have a solid TOS that covers everything you can think of, since money's involved.

That's not unique to Dreamhost -- that applies to every shared host on the planet.

Regardless of bogus SLA gimmicks, how high their prices are, or how much they refer to themselves as "quality" hosts, ALL shared hosts put your site at the mercy of other customers.

I have important sites on shared accounts, but I use failover DNS & two hosts, but that would be a little trickier with an active auction site.

Get dedicated hosting mate. You don't want your other sites, let alone anyone else's, taking down a business site. It needs to have it's own server. There's plenty of cheap deals around these days




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