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What Hosting Company Do YOU Use? (Time Sensitive)

edited December 2011 in Vanilla 2.0 - 2.8

I'm wondering which hosting company you use, to host your vanilla forum? Are you happy with them? Does the forum tun quickly and smoothly? Do they offer phone support? Tell me whatever you'd like to share!
Much appreciated, Hannah

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Answers

  • jspautschjspautsch Themester ✭✭✭

    Well there's always http://vanillaforums.com

  • RainulfRainulf New
    edited December 2011

    I host mine on my server. My server has been great so far, I'm quite happy with it. I may need to upgrade it soon though because I'm pretty much running of out space. My forum runs pretty smoothly, the support is tolerable, even though my self isn't very helpful at times, it suffices ;)

  • @jspautsch I know, thanks. I'm actually using them now, but am looking to switch out.

    @rainulf that doesn't help me much, lol, but thank! Good luck with your forums!

    Do you guys know anything about how they run on bluehost/godaddy/justhost/fatcow etc etc? Or anyone else? I appreciate all the feedback!

  • I'm with godaddy, no problems here

  • Really @mupetz? That's interesting, because I originally started with them, and then switched to Vanilla because it was too slow! Yours seems to run fast? How many users do you have? (If you don't mind me asking). I'd love to see it, if that's OK with you. If yes, provide link? Thanks!!

  • sahotataransahotataran Developer, Bay Area - CA ✭✭✭

    godaddy no problems yet. issue about low memory arised a couple of times during installation but it never did after that.

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  • fishingbb.com
    @Balaboostas, actually the forum is closed until 2012, while I'm working on a custom theme. I have 5000 members ( migrated from vBulletin )
    Good luck to you Hannah

  • aeryaery Gtricks Forum in 2.2 :) ✭✭✭

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  • hbfhbf wiki guy? MVP

    run my forum off my own server so i can't offer much insight. but i can say that the forum software is very web front end cpu intensive. so if the hosting plan you are on has your processes segregated to a small number of threads on a few cores, you will have page load and processing issues.

    Good luck with your forum!

  • If you have experiencing configuring a web server from scratch, I would recommend Linode as a VPS solution. I would argue they are the best VPS provider on the market.

    @hbf - I would say your issue is more in your web server configuration than Vanilla itself. Even when load testing my site/vanilla forum my apache/nginx processes barely go above idle in terms of CPU usage.

  • Thanks everyone for the replies. I switched to Bluehost and it was great for 2 weeks, now were slow again because of CPU usage? How do I know when I need a dedicated server? Maybe you know @hbf?

    @kastang how would I know if web server/configuration is the issue?

    @mupetz are you happy that you switched to Vanilla instead of vBuletin? Any issues w transfer?

  • hbfhbf wiki guy? MVP

    Kastang said:
    If you have experiencing configuring a web server from scratch, I would recommend Linode as a VPS solution. I would argue they are the best VPS provider on the market.

    @hbf - I would say your issue is more in your web server configuration than Vanilla itself. Even when load testing my site/vanilla forum my apache/nginx processes barely go above idle in terms of CPU usage.

    the cpu usage is near idle for a few people, but it increases exponentially with online users. Vanilla notifications and several plugins use timer based ajax callbacks and that coupled with normal traffic of refreshes and posts i see my box spike in processor time frequently. That said, i don't doubt that there is some tuning that can be done on my front end. My install is Apache on Windows, with a separate Windows VM hosting mySQL. The machine is only a dual processor DL380 G3 so it's not a mega server by any means, but it handles my web traffic volumes fine. I should note that I do NO PAGE CACHING. I want my data to remain dynamic. Hitting the browser back button to return me to the discussions page should update and give me that latest unread status IMHO.

    Balaboostas said:
    Thanks everyone for the replies. I switched to Bluehost and it was great for 2 weeks, now were slow again because of CPU usage? How do I know when I need a dedicated server? Maybe you know @hbf?

    For me I would want to see how frequently your Webservice process sits in a wait state due to multi-threading. It may be very difficult, if not impossible to get this information directly. So you'll need to dig in. Basically there are only two things that can make a web call take longer than optimal (optimal being the minimum wall clock time to perform the number of CPU cycles required to process the request, given no other interruptions)

    Either your process is being wait stated (pushed back in the execution stack) by some thing else, or your web server is waiting for data to be delivered from the mySQL call.

    You can eliminate the mySQL variable by running bench marking on a pages that randomly return a bunch of image resources. If you return 1000 different images of the same size 100 times, and ensure that each time the file time-date stamps change or you disable cacheing on the page, you will have a pretty good benchmark of pure webservice response. do that at different times during the day, especially when things seem so and note the time delta. if it's more than a few percentage points different then the webserver is choking somewhere. In my experience, it's probably choking on CPU, but it could be disk performance.

    If you don't see a big difference running that test, then it's likely mySQL is your bottleneck. move your database to a new host and you may resolve the issue.

    Hope that helps you narrow down the problem.

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