“…with more and more websites moving away from static pages to dynamically generated pages, the biggest limit that you will face is not your bandwidth or disk space, but what many web hosts vaguely classify as resource usage.” — thesitewizard.com
This is what happened to me, to Such Treasures, and to GNOWFGLINS.
About two weeks ago, I had about 5,000 visitors on one day to both my sites. For the next couple days I had around 1,000 visitors on each site. Those are not staggering statistics; they’re not shocking numbers. Sure, higher than normal. But enough to red flag my web host. They contacted me about my account’s excessive CPU usage.
“Hi, Your account is utilizing excessive resources, causing a significant degradation of services on the server. This is a shared environment and we can not allow one user to utilize the majority of the resources on a server as it affects all users adversely. Because of this, you have been temporarily moved…”
What? I was baffled. I thought I had practically unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage space! But they didn’t take issue with those limits, as I was nowhere near exceeding them. Rather, the “excessive resources” mentioned is the load put on the shared server by the dynamically-generated pages of both Such Treasures and GNOWFGLINS. I don’t know how to explain that well, so here’s a good explanation from thesitewizard.com:
“For those not familiar with the terminology, static pages are simple HTML web pages. … The web server merely displays what the pages contain with little extra work. Dynamically generated pages are what you get when you use blogging scripts like WordPress or content management systems like Drupal. The scripts assemble your web page from a variety of sources, such as your database and your templates, every time someone visits it.”
I took steps to help my sites run more efficiently, but no matter what I did, I could not get below the 1% threshhold of allowed CPU usage on the shared server. My alternative, with that web hosting company, was to upgrade to a $40/month virtual private server hosting plan. I thought it was just ridiculous that my little-but-growing sites would require all the resources of a $40 per month virtual private server hosting plan. Smaller increments sounded better to me.
I felt jilted. I had fallen for the typical promises of cheap web hosting companies — for “unlimited bandwidth” and “unlimited disk space”. I thought it impossible, or very unlikely, that I would ever outgrow that. Nobody told me about excessive CPU usage — and I had asked lots of questions and made lots of calls, trying to make an informed decision about choosing a web hosting company.
So I began to look around for another web host. I stumbled across web hosting that is called “clustered webhosting” from iMountain.com. Their servers are specifically set up for high-speed dynamic content, such as that generated and driven by WordPress. Here’s what sold me on this company in the beginning:
“iMountain.com’s famous “Clustered Hosting” provides you with the power of a VPS or better at the price of shared hosting. Make no mistake, we are not oversellers and we don’t do “overcrowded”. We take pride in our Premium hosting and we will always provide you with what we say we will.
Don’t be fooled by “Unlimited” hosting, 9 times out of 10, you’ll have your account suspended once your website gets good traffic. If you’ve ever been suspended for the enigmatic “too much CPU resource” usage on your “unlimited” plans, you’ll find that doesn’t happen here. We set realistic limits and what you pay for is what you get.”
Then I called iMountain and after sharing my situation, the salesperson assured me that they could help. Unless I sometime-in-my-wildest-dreams get 1000 hits per second, he guaranteed me that I would more likely outgrow my current plan’s bandwidth or storage threshholds before I could put an excessive load on the clustered servers at iMountain.
With iMountain, I chose a plan, not based on “unlimited” gimmicks, but rather, based on my bandwidth and storage space requirements, along with the number of domains I wished to host.
The good folks at iMountain.com took a backup of all my files from my old web host and they unpacked everything and set it all up for me at no charge. Just that is amazing! The move was so seamless and required very little effort on my part.
The icing on the cake is that iMountain is solar-powered. I think it is so cool that I can put this badge on my sites.
I’m not getting paid for talking up iMountain.com. Well, I might get some free months of hosting if you sign up. So, if you choose iMountain.com for your web hosting, be sure to tell them suchtreasures.com sent you.
For related reading, read my cancellation letter to my old web host: Open Letter to My (Old) Web Host.
That’s fascinating! Thanks for the info.
5000 visitors per day! That’s amazing. Congratulations!!
I’m sorry that you had such trouble w/your previous server but glad that you’ve found a new one that was very upfront and honest with you. This iMountain group sounds very good.
I am glad you had a good experience in moving over to iMountian. I do hope it works out for you.