Please someone help me. My forums have been disabled by my Host: "Hostgator" they said they need to be optimized. I don't have a clue what to do or where to start. How in the world do you optimize a forum? The page vists, the hits, the visitors, and eben the bandwidth have been the same. Please check the following image to see what I'm talking about: Thank you in advance for all your help
I think that your site is not optimazed is not the reasen that you site will be disabled. You use to much bandwidth. Thay are offering unlimited bandwidth and than suspend the sites. Go for limited offers, there is no unlimited diskspace and bandwidth.
Can you please explain exactly what I need to do. Do you mean I should change hosts and look for a package that has limited bandwidth instead of unlimited bandwidth? Please advise
Finally I got my Forums unblocked by Hostgator. I had to work for all night to optimize the site. I also deleted over 10.000 files and moved few other websites that I had under the same account to another hosting company. I m thinking about hosting my own websites now. I'm tired of these companies treating me this way just because my website get more visits than they can handle. I m looking to buy my own servers and do everything out of my house. What do you guys think?
From the stats I see you are not using too much resources.(about 30GB raffic/month) I think you can be ok on some shared hosting plans. Anyway you should not consider hostgator/godaddy etc if you want something serious. You can go with a small managed VPS.
You need not get a dedicated server for your requirements that will be an over buy. Just go for a VPS, my personal preference would be Xen or KVM VPS ahead of OpenVZ. HG is good for shared hosting but not so for VPS, so u may try looking out for more VPS offers in wht. btw! what forum script are you using ? What is your daily traffic, I meant no.of users online during your peak hours and non-peak hours.
What would it cost me to go with a VPS? I'm using Vbulletin 4.0 I get around 4500 visitors. But after Hostgator disabled the forum, that number almost got cut to half. The most I ever got was around 12k at the same time. Here is a small script that I made to check and compare with other forums: Checkthisup[dot]com/7 Thank you
Hello, It looks like you have really grown out of shared hosting, you would probably be looking at a VPS with 2Gb of ram, 2 CPU cores and a decent amount of disk space with cPanel for ease of use. That is about 60-70$ for a reliable VPS service. PM me and I might be able to help you out. -Seth
Thank you Seth for your message. As a hosting specialist, do you think it would be a wise idea for me to host it myself? I mean out of my house?
I'm guessing they haven't blocked your site for using too much bandwidth, as you're only using about 30GB/mo. Shared hosting is more than enough to handle that. Did they give you any information on the CPU/RAM you were using?
Yeah I got that part, my question is: would it be feasible to have a home server and run it from home, or is it too much hustle? No they did not give me any information on the CPU/RAM usage. I wonder why. But see it's just a forum I don't have nothing there that would require too many resources. Do I?
All you need to do is get a reliable vps hosting provider, let the hosting provider take care of the vps management and you focus on growing your forum. If you are not from technical background then managing a VPS would be very difficult, most of your time will go in troubleshooting the vps issues. There are many hosting provider who offer free vps management. Sign up with them and focus on your forum only. Would you prefer to have a VPS in US or some other location would also be fine?
You definitely don't want to run it out of your house. Firstly, most ISPs do not allow you to run servers. You would ideally need a dedicated IP, and a plan from your ISP that would allow you to host servers (generally far more expensive). You also have to remember that the upload speed on most ISPs isn't very fast (it would be the upload speed that would matter, not the download speed), if your power goes out, ISP goes down, etc., your server is going to be down. Hosting is cheap enough to where hosting a server at home should never really be a viable option. You need to ask HG through a ticket or such, exactly why they suspended your account. Ask them for graphs, figures, etc. That's the only way you're really going to know what happened. Since they told you to optimize your forum, I'm guessing it's MySQL queries or such that is causing the issue. It's possible that you were hitting the database server pretty hard. Certain forums (especially vBulletin) can definitely use a lot of CPU/RAM as well. What I can't stand is that people here are recommending dedicated servers and VPSs, because that's conveniently what they sell (imagine that!! ), but without the actual usage figures, it's impossible for any of them to determine what you need. You need to get the exact usage figures from Hostgator, and only then can we all sit down here and figure out the best solution for you. It might be that you need a VPS or dedicated server for your forum, but saying that without seeing anything besides the hits and bandwidth usage is absolutely rididulous.
I think you are right. I already dedicate to much time taking care of the websites. At the moment I have 46 websites, which I think is a very bad idea. It's better to have few good websites than to have a lot of bad websites. I really don't know much about managing a VPS or anything similar. I don't think it would be that hard to get a dedicated IP. How expensive that would be if you had to guess. I live in Oklahoma City and (Cox communication here seems to have good packages) I have a home made wind generator, Few solar panels and a Gas generator. That will definitely keep the battery pack charged. That is not really an issue. Yeah that makes a lot of sense. I will definitely do that. Thank you for the great advice. That guy I chatted with from Hostgator did not say anything about MySQL. But he was trying to explain things the easiest way possible. Do you think I should switch to another Forum software? Thank you so much
Well, it actually sounds like you're setup okay for running it out of your house if you really wanted to. Much better than most. Might actually save you money in the long-run, and you would have direct control over your own "dedicated server" instead of a VPS or shared account somewhere. As far as the cost, Cox Oklahoma City is showing 10/2 business Internet service for $70/mo. They actually list it as 1/2mbps upload, whatever that means. Maybe 1mbps guaranteed and you can burst to 2? No clue. Their fastest plan is only 5mbps upload speed, but there is no price listed. If the cheap plan is $70, you can take a good guess at what the 5mbps plan would cost (4 plans above the lowest). And 5mbps is ridiculously slow, especially for a busy server. I would definitely not switch forum software. vBulletin is probably the best forum software there is.
What does 10/2 mean? What is a good speed I should look for? A lot of people are saying a lot of good things about xenForo. What do you think?
Most likely, yes. All the other hosting companies they own went massively downhill. They are known for being complete garbage. The speed to the server will be 10mbps. The speed away from the server (i.e. to forum users) will be 2mbps. Almost any VPS or dedicated server in an actual datacenter will be a 100mbps link in both directions. 1gbps is becoming more and more popular. I like Xenforo, but they are having some major issues...i.e. the lawsuit vs. vBulletin.