I’ve gotten to the point where I’m so fed up with the “CPU Exceeded” messages that appear with annoying regularity on this site that I’m looking again for a new web hosting provider. The current provider is HostMonster and they are nice, have a good price, great support, and can’t help me figure out why there seem to be run away processes that chew up CPU and so shut down the website fairly frequently.
1&1 is out; I moved to HostMonster from them. Because of the amount of traffic, I’m also not considering hosting the site on my own machine in my home office. Any recommendations?
What is your budget? I’ve always gone with real co-location hosting when possible. $100/mo is one of the lower prices I’ve encountered recently.
I’ve had a vhost with JohnCompanies for the past few years. Support is great, you only talk with people who actually know what they are doing. I’ve had a couple of problems with runaway processes over the years, basically I got an email saying that the server is being swamped, and they give me a chance to sort it out instead of shutting everything down.
The budget is $100/mo or less, and I’ll try to minimize within that subject to requirements and quality. I’ll take a look at JohnCompanies, but other suggestions are welcome.
I use bluehost.com to host http://daveshields.net, though it has almost no traffic, so I can’t vouch for how they would handle the load of a site as widely read as yours. bluehost uses Linux.
Steve O’Grady uses JohnCompanies and recently wrote a glowing post about his experience using it to host redmonk.com.
thanks,dave
I’ve heard good things about slicehost, http://www.slicehost.com , if you are looking for VPS. For shared hosting I’ve been happy with siteground, http://www.siteground.com .
Don’t D-I-Y. Ever. Can’t sleep well at night that way.
Personally, I’ve been happy for years with Catalyst2. They are based on Ireland.
If you’re not genuinely running out of CPU, but for runaway processes, have you tried running a ’sniper’ process? A simple script that identifies runaway processes and automatically kills them. It’s a duct tape solution, but McGyver got away with clips and duct tape :-)
I’ve done a bit more research and basically all the usual shared server hosters have the same CPU caps. While it might be something on HostMonster’s end that is causing the problem, I’m leery of shifting to another shared provider where I will just duplicate my problem after a lot of transfer work. I also heard that I would essentially replicate my HM problem at BlueHost.
JohnCompanies is looking like a very possible choice.
I have used Kattare for 5 years and have never had a problem. It’s known as a premier Java host but also does a lot of PHP/mySQL.
BlueHost, like many shared hosts, tends to put too many sites on one box. My low-volume site (
Hi Bob, check out Dreamhost, I’m not sure what their CPU limits are for their shared hosting packages, but from my experience, they offer an incredible list of features, at a very competitive price. Not only that but every week they give you more disk space and bandwidth!
I’m sure they’d answer an email inquiring about the CPU capping.
And just for the record, I’m just a happy customer, with a few websites hosted under one hosting plan!
Feel free to email me if you have any further questions.
Hope that helps, Simon.
You are wanting to implement what Irving Wladawsky-Berger would call ‘market-facing software’; i.e. software for use by users who are not under your management control; some of whom have a different agenda from yours. And your agendas may be mutually-incompatible.
It’s hard. Really hard. IBM Research mathematicians say it’s impossible to get it right all the time.
IBM Software Group and IBM Global Business Services will quote, to take responsibility. $100/month might be a challenge to get down to.
I’ve always wondered where the VM hosting companies are… you’d think with all the years of experience in the VM world, finding run-away job hogging processes would be “old hat” by now. But so far, I’ve yet to find any.
( http://cabbey-blog.blogspot.com/2007/05/so-wheres-benefit-from-test-plan.html )
I’ve used ReadyHosting.com for many years without problems or price increases (incredibly), and I host a half dozen sites through them. Best of all, their control panel is graphical, intuitive, and doesn’t make you go through 14 screens just to set up a new account or email. Start with the cheaper plans and move up as needed. They won’t punish you.
Zaine, it appears that ReadyHosting is Windows only? I plan to go with a Linux hoster.
I must say that slicehost probably comes closest to what I have in mind. I may give it a shot on some other things and then move the main site over. While I’m still thinking about this, any other recommendations are welcome.
My nephew suggested JumpLine. Does anyone have any experience with them?