From the Desk of Asif Nawaz

Recently, I’ve had some hosting problems. You all may also have seen the site become suspended. I have now been forced to make a mirror of my web site so that in the event that my current host suspends my hosting, I have a back up for people to go to.

All web developers, designers, and masters face this dilemma. Who is the one host who will provide us with the most for the best possible price. The truth of the matter is, however, that for someone who’s willing to launch an important web site where you plan to get some serious traffic or do some serious business, you really need a decent budged allottment, becaue as with all things, if it sounds too damn good, there really is something not right about it. I wouldn’t consider this a full fledged review on the best host around yet. However, I’m just going to highlight here some of the problems that hosts to claim to give a lot have. The site Asifism.com is currently hosted on http://www.servage.net. I have now moved the mirror to http://InnoDomains.com, a GoDaddy Franchise that I own. I’ve been using InnoDomains for several years, but I didn’t host more than one of my own sites with them because they didn’t provide multiple domain hosting. They do now. The only problem with GoDaddy and InnoDomains and alikes is that the back end interface and control panel runs a little slow. It’s written on a mixture of .NET and PHP, which is why, I think, we see that it’s slower than others like servage, who also have their own customized control panel, which, although runs faster, has slowed down substantially recently.

Now to make this less of a review for now (because I am writing a more comprehensive review of which hosts to consider for serious web masters, and not people who have 15 websites with a total of 20 unique users daily), here’s why servage suspended my web site. I’ve had an increase in traffic from the day I relaunched this site in January. I started using eXtreMe Tracking (http://extremetracking.com) for stats in February. I went for 54 to 234 to 1100+ to 3000+ of unique IP hits each month. Servage has suspended my site twice since then, claiming that I went over my allotted bandwidth limit of 100 GB a day. That’s not possible, because most users come here to download HP Quick play Direct or Quick play for Windows. Now, quick play direct is 700 MB and is not allowed more than 100 downloads in any 24 hour period, which restricts it to 75 GB max. Quick play for Windows is 75 MB and has the same restriction, so� 100 downloads of that would make 8 GB. Now way in hell am I crossing 100 GB yet.

Here’s what the statistics for servage show for Tuesday and Wednesday this last month, May 22nd and May 23rd:

See that spike of 50,000+ pageviews and hits. Where in the world did that come from. And to use almost 130GB of bandwidth in one day is pretty intense. Last time they accused me of using 3200 GB or 3.2 TeraBytes of bandwidth in one day. What am I running, Amazon.com?!! They’ve got something wrong, especially when they showed me no more than 990 displays of the home page (which they happened to list most popular for that day).

Here’s extreme tracking, the key that they use to identify uniques and reloads, and here’s what their statistics say:

Now tell me who hasn’t got it right? Do servage statistics even sound remotely possible?
Extreme Tracking is respected and widely used in the web development world. So, in line with the reviews I read about servage, with a similar incident taking place last month, it seems like the day you’ll use more than 10 GB of bandwidth, they’re going to multiply that by 10 and suspend your account. I even took it up with servage support saying something is fishy and wrong, but nope, they said their stats are right and they can’t do anything about it, a weak argument from someone who really didn’t know what the fuck he/she was talking about. But that’s customer service from all IT related providers, isn’t it? Problem is, I have multiple web sites running on my account, including a shopping store or two! I’ll still give them another chance while I mirror on InnoDomains (not like I have a choice, I had to prepay for six months). But, look at the dodgy stats keeping techniques.

Anyway, that’s all for this article. Look out for the hosting review, it provides information on others like Lunarpages, hostgator, blurstorm, GoDaddy/InnoDomains alike, and the likes of Hostway and Rackspace. I’ve done some rather strenuous research, mght as well share it with everyone.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 5:08 pm and is filed under News & Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.