Green Geeks Usage Scam?

Has anyone else had usage issues with Green Geeks? Not a designer myself but should a website receiving 100-500 hits a day really need to be upgraded from a shared server to the much more expensive VPS? I know at some point as traffic grows this transition will be needed but can't believe this type of current traffic would warrant this type of upgrade and have the feeling Green Geeks is just trying to scam.

A month after launching they did a supposed server upgrade which was a complete lie and turned out to be a usage downgrade. We added a Cache plugin and Wordpress hardening per their suggestions and everything seemed to be ok for awhile. Now as soon as our Malware/Web Protection found a vulnerability from Green Geeks they seemed to cause as many issues as possible because they have to do some work. Three different emails from three different people within ten minutes. One stating they are cutting usage numbers in half basically forcing us to upgrade or leave which seems like a violation of terms.

So I am asking for the expertise of other website owners and Green Geeks users to ask what kind of traffic really warrants an upgrade to VPS and secondly anyone else have these usage issues with Green Geeks?

Thank you

 

Hi,

The number of hits doesn't necessarily have as much to do with the load as other factors. There could be CRON jobs, for example, running extensive PHP processes, heavy MySQL usage, etc., and you would be causing heaps of server load without a single visitor.

That said, if all you are running is a simple WordPress site with 100-500 visitors, no, it would not be normal to have to upgrade to a VPS. It's going to be really hard for anyone here to help you without any sort of data, but if you want to ask Green Geeks for the actual usage data, and what resources they claim are maxing out the server (i.e. is it RAM usage, disk i/o, CPU, etc.?), there should be a lot of people here able to help you out.

Unfortunately, they are yet another "unlimited" host.

 

Thanks for the reply. They are stating the CPU usage is hitting 100% so don't really know which numbers to show. Their reporting is not too user friendly.

 

Just ask from GreenGeeks support what plugins cause such a heavy CPU usage.

 

Will definitely try that next and thanks!

 

Looks like it is the one cron job I have set up. Been reading up on these and looks like they are usage intensive but why and how can anyone use them if such a problem on usage? Is there any way to optimize cron jobs?

 

How often are you running the cron? Crons themselves are not really usage intensive. It is the PHP scripts they normally call that are the problem.

 

I only do one blog post per day but maybe it is set up to look too frequently and running too often. Think I know what you are getting at and found these links below which I might try.

http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/website-troubleshooting/intensive-cron-jobs-or-scheduled-tasks
http://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/wordpress/disabling-the-wp-cronphp-in-wordpress

 

Are you still having issues a month later?

150 visits a day is nothing. Your provider may be just too strict on resources, or the server is overloaded itself (i.e. too many accounts sharing the same resources).

Enable CloudFlare immediately - this will help you out. Then look at some alternative hosts to test out perhaps with a secondary site. Go through their AUP and see how generous (or strict) they are on resources, and make the decision to move away if you continue to have issues with your existing host.

 

Little more digging and think I might have found the issue but if anyone has any thoughts let me know.

I use WPematico to import a daily blog post from an RSS feed. When we first installed this it was not picking things up at the correct time we had set so we just set the fetch/cron settings to all times which is causing the over usage I believe. I think the Cache plugin is the culprit as to why the fetch wasn't working as scheduled causing us to change settings to all times so I am thinking about deactivating WPematico to see if that will bring down the usage. Bummer that plugins don't always cooperate together.

 

Deactivated WPematico so no longer have the cronjob running but still getting emails from my host. Non-stop from them with error logs and usage issues. Already installed a cache plugin, deactivated the import/cronjob plugin and still have the same issues. I am not a coder and files of error codes don't mean anything to me or my designer.

What trusted companies can review a website to fix errors and usage issues?

 

There are some other automatic RSS importers for Wordpress that I used. Some don't use cron jobs.

 

Just google Greengeeks scam, and you'll see how many dodgy stories they are hiding behind. I'd struggle to believe they do anything environmental like they claim. The moment the veneer has worn off, and you start asking them hard questions, they stop answering, and grab as much money from you as possible.

I'm calling my credit card company tomorrow to sort it out due to charges they made to my credit card without permission.