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My ProductsA Warning About Hostgator Shared Hosting
When it comes to choosing a shared hosting solution, I've always recommended people to use Hostgator. For the last 3 years I've been using the shared service with no problems whatsoever, and I also use the dedicated hosting which is really good.
As a result of having no problems with the Hostgator Shared Hosting, I grew to trust it perhaps a little more than I should have. That's not to say that it is a bad service, but I decided to host an important video there over the weekend, and when I mailed it out to my subscribers, hostgator decided to shut it down.
The reason I was given by their support staff was that it was using up too much CPU power.
Now I was very frustrated because I did not receive any phone warning, I blissfully slept through the night while 1000s of my subscribers tried to click the link to the video only for it to be broken.
It was also particularly frustrating when their support staff told me that they sent me an email as warning (like I check my email in the middle of the night).
You see at Hostgator Shared Hosting you get lots of bandwidth, but read the fine print, you don't get lots of CPU power with shared hosting, so if you are getting a flood of visitors to your website, then you have the potential to get shut down.
This isn't temporary, they refuse to put the content back online. It took me a lot (and by a lot I mean over 2 hours) of talking to them to get them to allow me to put up a redirect from the shared hosting to my dedicated server, thus fixing the link. In all the video was down for about 9 hours.
Until now, Hostgator Shared Hosting has been fantastic, it has had zero downtime and has always been a fast and reliable webhost for me. Their dedicated hosting is even better.
However as a warning to others, don't get too comfortable with any form of shared hosting. If your website grows significantly in terms of visitor numbers, then sooner or later you should strongly consider upgrading to dedicated hosting so that you won't run the risk of being shut down right when your website is at its all time best.
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I just responded to an email you sent out about the interview your promoted with Andrew Fox and how the link is not working. Is this blog entry the answer to the link that does not work?
Cheers
AP
I use DreamHost for my personal sites and will get started with my affiliate business in the near future. (I'm doing something else first and that is intentional.)
DreamHost hasn't been perfect, and some of their issues have indeed been legendary (they're very honest about publicizing their faults and how they intend to address them), and yet I've found them to be stable over the last year and a half. I only get email or occasionally chat support with my inexpensive plan, but it's been good support.
I haven't run into a situation where I used too many CPU cycles, but I know DreamHost specifically says they're willing to work with website owners before taking their sites offline. I have no personal experience with DreamHost in this process, so please don't take this as my endorsement.
I'm assuming Affilorama Premium's shared hosting is better in this regard than is HostGator's?
I dont understand shared hosting (newbie thing) but i do think any company offering services sould at the very least give a warning to anyone violating ther terms.
sorry again Mark.
yes i have never belived the hype put out by most of the main stream web hosts a tip
go to the site webhosting talk and study there different forums theres nothing about hosting and web hosts that you wont learn
another great post i must congruate mark and the team on his great series of interviews with internet marketing gurus i have learnt such a lot
thanks peter mcgrath
My suggestion is to get Amazon S3 account and host videos from there. This will solve problem and if not amazon then vps/dedicated plans of any hosting service are good as they can let you host ffmpeg/streaming to it's full potential. So my point is for streaming/ffmpeg purpose shared hosting is not the plan to choose.
Now talking about removing content and not returning it back is serious issue and such hosts are need to be avoided.
"UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH" on their home page for shared hosting.
But they say nothing about unlimited CPU power.
Pretty clever, it's just marketing, I'm sure other shared hosting sites all also do this to you if you have massive traffic.
Thanks for the heads up. Can you let us know about alternatives to Host Gator? I was tempted to use GoDaddy, but decided not to after I saw tons of internet review sites that were critical of it.
Thanks for sharing, I had the same issue with Godaddy's shared hosting. Without any warning they shutdown my support and redirect application. It was a bit of a shock since all my affiliate redirects were handled by that application. It took me three days to get it back online. For me it was quite a wake-up call and reminded me never to place the faith of my business in the hands of one provider again. My traffic was far below Godaddy''s limit, but the 10-17k requests to the database took up to much CPU power.
I was angry but looking back at it I was at fault as well, using cheap hosting for the lifeblood of the business and no "plan B" in case of this single point of failure situation.
Take care,
Hans
If you decide you want to use Start Logic perhaps you'll sign on through my link. I'm an affiliate and have been pretty satisfied with them. Normal charges are about the same as Hostgator.
Bruce
The only reason that I use shared hosting is so that I know a good shared hosting provider to recommend to affilorama members, but it seems from talking to others that Amazon S3 is the way to go for that kind of thing. I'll check them out. Hostgator shared hosting is fine if you don't expect a lot of traffic all at once, but once you are making enough money, dedicated hosting is a must if you want to minimize your chances of downtime.
Hostgator's dedicated hosting is great, I've never had a problem there. It's just their shared hosting that I've had this issue with that has frustrated me, not least of all their customer service in the matter who were reluctant to be helpful at all. I have had good dealings with their customer support in the past, just to give a balanced perspective. I also use rackspace for dedicated servers, who are second to none, but are about 5 times more expensive than hostgator for dedicated hosting.
Thanks a lot for sharing this problem with us.It´s good to know this.
I recommend CloudFiles for all video content. It's similar to Amazon's S3, but it's serves content through Limelight CDN. You can Google all that stuff if you're not familiar with it.
CloudFiles is a Rackspace product, and you can check out a demo here: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/files
By putting your videos on CloudFiles, all the "heavy lifting" is done by the CDN, and the rest of your site can be served up from a shared host.
Full disclosure: I work at Rackspace, but I use CloudFiles on all my affiliate sites. It also costs pennies, so you can check it out very cheaply.
Good luck everyone,
-Devin
If you have a good host, they will be understanding even if they get mad and suspend site at first. I got really angry when they suspended mine when that happened, but it was only to protect their servers -- which is understandable. I decided to stick with them -- no one (or host) is perfect and trying to find a new one can be daunting.
Need to have good support, that's very important. You need to feel confident that if there's a problem you will have help 24/7. That's probably most important to me -- in addition to a speedy server.
For $10 a month I can host multiple sites for as much space and bandwidth allocated. It's a great server in my experience -- and don't plan to go hunting for a new one anytime soon.
Good luck!
Jeff
So if someone hasn't tried this feature yet, don't let that asset just sit there, we're putting more then enough money in Marks pockets as it is. :-)
All the best,
Hans
To answer your point about how I could be using dedicated hosting, like I mentioned in my last comment, I already do have several dedicated servers. I also like to have at least one shared server hosting for a few of my minor websites and also I was hosting some videos there too (until now) because I like to know who to recommend as a shared host to my members.
Until now, hostgator has been reliable, however I was shocked at how little their customer support appeard to care about my situation and it took me over 2 hours on talking to their support staff to get this matter resolved (where they finally allowed me to move the content to a dedicated server and set up a redirect).
Yes I was frustrated when I posted my story above, but in the past I've had nothing but glowing comments of hostgator and this story brings a little balance, basically warning others if you find you are getting high volume traffic, don't stick with shared hosting forever, it's only great as a starting point. Once you are getting 1000s of visitors a day, then it is risky to stay with it.
So far what has happened to Mark is not a total surprise. I have had some minor issues with Hostgator, but all resolved. I still use them. Good to be reminded that even the top providers can let you down.
Harry
I'm the owner of hostgator and I'm truly sorry for this issue that you had with us. Let me explain how are limits work so that you have a better understanding of what to expect in a shared environment.
In a shared environment we put a few hundred shared hosting accounts on a top of the line server with the following specs:
2x Quad Core Xeon E5520 @ 2.27 GHz
12GB Ram
1.5 TB RAID 1 holding OS (15k rpm)
2TB RAID 5 holding user data. (7200 rpm)
Contrary to what our TOS says we don't actually have a cpu or ram limit. You can use as much cpu and ram as you want as long as you aren't crashing the server or causing high loads. In this particular case it appears your site began using more cpu and memory then everyone else on the server combined. This resulted in performance issues for everyone on the server which is why we had to take action against your account.
We wish we could warn you first but unfortunately the hundreds of customers that your site affected demanded we take action immediately. If it was the other way around and someone else was causing your account to run poorly I'm sure you wouldn't want us to give just a warning. You would want the problem fixed immediately which would mean disabling the problem.
On a dedicated server you will never be disabled no matter how much you crash the server since the only customer affected by the poor performance is you.
Here's something interesting to consider....
In many cases a hostgator shared hosting account will be faster than a customer who purchases a dedicated server. The reason is that we are so loose with the resources we allow to be used and our server is so powerful that in many instances it's going to outperform a dedicated with only a single account on it.
At the end of the day on a shared hosting account what it comes down to is that you are either crashing the server or you aren't. We have unlimited bandwidth deals in place with our provider so it has nothing to do with the cost of the bandwidth.
If you have any questions of if there is anything I can to help the situation please email me at brent@hostgator.com I am personally available to all of our customers no matter how small of an account they may have.
Sincerely,
Brent Oxley
Thanks for taking the time to comment on this post, I really appreciate you taking the time.
I will update my blog post shortly to be less harsh as I do agree with you in that you do have to take measures against people who are crashing a server. Although it's a shame you can't limit the traffic rather than just nixing it altogether.
I explained to the hostgator support that the surge in traffic was only for a short number of minutes while my email went out to everyone on my subscriber list, but they refused to put it back online and also at first refused to allow me to put up a redirect on my site to redirect it to a dedicated server (2 hours later they agreed to do this).
I admit that I was frustrated when I made this post, and I will adjust it to be more balanced, although it is important that people realize that with any shared hosting, that if they know they are getting a lot of traffic, even if it is just for a few minutes and not for the entire day or week, then they need to be looking at dedicated hosting.
Again, I want to thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed reply, it is a lot more than other webhosts would do. I also want to reiterate that Hostgator Shared Hosting has been very good for the last few years up until this event and I do rate the dedicated hosting highly.
Thanks for the info. I am getting ready for some to put up some videos and was wondering if I should put them on Host Gator or just embed them from YouTube.
Thanks.
Get Better Sleep
cheers
mike
Email Brent? Or customer service first, and then Brent if they can't resolve the situation?
Really interesting post and nice to see the reply from Hostgator. Like a few people have already said is that they don't understand by what you mean by shared hosting and all the different types of hosting.
I think it would be really great if Mark or someone at affilorama could do an article on the different types of hosting and what all the jargon means.
Kerry
I am wondering what everyone's opinion of Affilorma hosting is. Our sites are currently with HostGator and we are wondering if we should transfer them to Affilorma Hosting. I eagerly await your input.
know what you're getting yourself into. if you don't understand CPU and such, then ask someone who does. but DON'T purchase a shared server account and complain about it afterwards because you failed to do your research.
I'm rather shocked by this review. I also use HostGator to host my sites and have never had anything problems (Although I suppose you didn't either until that happened).
I'll definitely have to be careful with how much resources I'm using, then.
Thanks, Jake..
I wish hosting accounts offered some kind of an "overdraft protection" for customers who get an average of X traffic per day but may have one day a year when they get 10,000X. It's impractical to pay for 10,000 times your average traffic every single day to guard against that one rare big day. But it also stinks to have your site shut down on your biggest day of the year.
I've never had a problem with static sites getting these spikes, though -- i.e., plain old HTML pages. Only dynamic sites (like WordPress blogs or forums) that significantly use the CPU with every visitor have given me problems.
your post is intertesting, can you share the blueprint that Rob follows? I will keep watching your post . great!