Is my web host trying to rip me off?

background:
i just started a forum using vBulletin on this webhost in July. When it started, everything was pretty much ok, but then i got complaints from my users about lag and inconsistent access to the site.

the web host then told me something about scripts causing some problems in the server, blah blah blah. and suggested to me to upgrade to VPS account. Fine, i went along with it, then after 1 week, i am getting the same kind of lag before the upgrade. The webhost have the nerve to suggest upgrading to a higher VPS plan.

What can be done to see if my forum is the cause of the problems and not the web host that is playing punk with me?

 

You started the forum in July? This means it shouldn't be having much activity. Thus traffic overload is ruled out here.

vBulletin has a lot of features which may overload a server, but these can be turned off or slowed down.

If you can give the url and host name, it would be better.

 

It does sound like the host is trying to upsell without trying to fix the problem.

How many users?
How many concurrent users?
How many posts?
How much bandwidth per day?

Atleast this will give us some idea of your usage.

 

url is at http://www.tradeourmarkets.com

host name is siteground

 

hope the information might help shed some light

 

wow, that's nothing.....

The concurrent users is the most important number.
We have a forum client, with 800-1000 concurrent users.
Server probably not optimized and/or poor configuration.

 

but are you on VPS or just a ordinary hosting account?

 

Ordinary shared account

 

this was the response when i opened a ticket

During the last 24 hours, we have noticed that your website was consuming a very high percentage of the server resources and endangered the performance of your site and all the sites on the server.

Upon further investigation we have discovered that the increased resource consumption was caused by serveral multiple PHP processes launched by your forum application. Generally each PHP script that was launched had relatively little resource consumption and having a few processes running would not affect the server's performance, however your account had more than 5 PHP scripts running constantly for quite a while, which affected the server's performance. Below you can see a snapshot from the "top" tool, showing the processes with most resource usage:

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
10668 user_name 16 0 22084 11m 4756 R 19 0.3 0:00.20 php
10664 user_name 16 0 0 0 0 Z 17 0.0 0:00.18 php
10665 user_name 16 0 0 0 0 Z 17 0.0 0:00.18 php
10658 mazzikat 17 0 61400 17m 4680 R 16 0.4 0:00.20 php
10660 mazzikat 17 0 61200 17m 4680 R 16 0.4 0:00.18 php
10657 user_name 16 0 0 0 0 Z 14 0.0 0:00.19 php
8483 mysql 15 0 588m 252m 5004 S 12 6.2 238:06.03 mysqld
10663 user_name 17 0 20808 9.8m 4576 R 7 0.2 0:00.07 php
10667 cattrave 16 0 54648 10m 4684 R 7 0.3 0:00.07 php
10648 user_name 16 0 0 0 0 Z 6 0.0 0:00.19 php
10666 user_name 17 0 52660 8936 4376 R 5 0.2 0:00.05 php

Below you can see the processes launched by your account:

user_name 10941 9.5 0.0 0 0 ? Z 02:41 0:00

user_name 10943 9.5 0.0 0 0 ? Z 02:41 0:00 [php]
user_name 10947 19.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 02:41 0:00 [php]
user_name 10954 20.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 02:41 0:00 [php]
user_name 10957 19.0 0.2 22100 11600 ? R 02:41 0:00 /usr/bin/php mgc_chatbox.php
user_name 10960 2.0 0.1 51016 6816 ? S 02:41 0:00 /usr/bin/php mgc_chatbox.php
root 10962 0.0 0.0 3748 656 pts/1 R+ 02:41 0:00 grep user_name
user_name 10963 0.0 0.3 55764 12448 ? R 02:41 0:00 /usr/bin/php showthread.php
user_name 10964 0.0 0.1 51000 6820 ? S 02:41 0:00 /usr/bin/php mgc_chatbox.php

As you can see the PID (process id) of processes launched by your account are different and the two commands were executed in just several seconds between. This means that your account is spawning PHP processes quite fast and that suggest heavy activity on your site.

PHP:

 

persistant connections turned on? I wonder how many customers are on the box

 

how much do you pay monthly for hosting?

 

Yeah, i would look at the persistent connection thing.
Also might want to contact the author of the script, to see if this is normal behaviour

 

paid upfront 83.40 for a year.
then upgraded to VPS at 89/month

now they want me to further upgrade...

 

They even applied some patches on the VPS server after my complains. was ok for a while, then they replied that they needed to apply some more patch.

their reply below:
The current monitoring system allowed higher load on your VPS to be generated which may cause the issue you have experienced. The new monitoring system should manage the services on your VPS better and this issue should not be present.

Note that now all the services on your VPS should be stable but you may experience slow time for your website until the new monitoring system is applied.

Please note that we do our best to implement the new monitoring system as fast as possible but we would like to test it before going live in order to prevent any issues.

Then they closed the ticket

 

Their reply a day later (after i complained again of intermittent service):
The new monitoring system is installed already on your VPS. I have checked the services and everything seems to be working fine. Note that the monitoring system is set to check all the services on your VPS and to restart them if they are stalled. This means that if a service is stalled it will be restarted within seconds from the monitoring system. Note that the MySQL Services way take up to a minute to be restarted if there are transactions for your databases.

Additionally I have checked now the services for your VPS and they are stable and none of them requires any action to be taken to work as it should.

Also I checked your application and it is loading without any errors. We have set on all our VPSes an option for the MySQL service to log the slow MySQL queries. I have checked the log file for you. It seems that your application is generating huge number of slow MySQL queries which may cause it is timeout if there is a lack of Internet between your ISP and our Data-Center. I have created a copy of the slow sql log under your account root folder. This way you should be able to check it and optimize your database in order to prevent any options for timeouts. You may need also to contact an exert local web developer to assist you and re-index your database. Note that the slow queries may cause a timeout when there are larger number of visitors.

Once your application database is optimized you should experience any issues with your website.

After i reply that i still am unable to access my site, they told me one of my scripts is the cause. Then i turned it off and guess what, it still does not solve the problem. So they said they will look into it and the below was what they came back with

We have set a few extra patches for your VPS. We have set the child processes your Apache may start to 30 and set the time out from 15 to 30 seconds as well. It seems that this stabilized your application. From the tests initiated it seems that there is still a components included in the index.php file which may cause the application to timeout. This component should load data from an external source. Please double check all your external links and make sure that none of them may timeout.

Also you may contact an expert local web developer to double check your application scripts and to set it to continue when a link has timed out. This way you should not experience the white screen error any more.

Please check it.

Fine.
i asked for the query that is causing the problem, so that i can isolate it.
Their response:

I have checked the case further and it seems your website is slow because the scripts are trying to establish a connection to the following IP addresses:

206.190.56.229
204.157.6.3

Since the firewall is blocking their attempt, they are just retrying and retrying till the page times out and you get a blank one.

In order for the issue to be solved, I would like to recommend you to disable the component/module which is trying to use them. The requests appears to be bound to finance.yahoo.com.

Here is the output of the test I have conducted to came upon such conclusion:

connect(5, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(53), sin_addr=inet_addr("204.157.6.3")}, 28) = 0
fcntl64(5, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR)
fcntl64(5, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0
gettimeofday({1187659144, 181404}, NULL) = 0
poll([{fd=5, events=POLLOUT, revents=POLLOUT}], 1, 0) = 1
send(5, "\315\211\1\0\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\7finance\5yahoo\3com\0\0"..., 35, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 35
poll([{fd=5, events=POLLIN, revents=POLLIN}], 1, 5000) = 1
ioctl(5, FIONREAD, [373]) = 0
recvfrom(5, "\315\211\201\200\0\1\0\2\0\10\0\10\7finance\5yahoo\3co"..., 1024, 0, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(53), sin_addr=inet_addr("204.157.6.3")}, [16]) = 373
close(5) = 0

 

Well, first of all, imo, vps's aren't all what they're cracked up to be.

Secondly, what do they care if your cpu is high and it crashes your vps.
The whole idea with a vps, is that you're isolated from other users on the server.
So, if you crash your vps, it's your problem and the host shouldn't be concerned with cpu usage.

 

j3r0m3 that is absolutely ridiculous! I'm running a forum with nearly 5000 members & maybe 80-100 on at once. My bandwidth total comes to about 50Gb / day.

I would highly recommend Servage. 360Gb of space & 3600Gb monthly bandwidth. Unlimited domains, email accounts, mysql databases etc.

Their website is http://www.servage.net

DoA

 

if you pay about $10 per month or more than that , then i will suggest you to buy a VPS.
i can help you with it.
i can provide you a VPS for $15 per month with cpanel/whm included for free.
it will be Fully Managed for free.
200 gb bandwith
100 mbps uplink
99.99% uptime guarantee or 50% off at your next month's payment.
10 gb hdd space
256 mb ram.
2 ip addresses
2 x dual intel xeon 3 ghz processors.
VPS Panel: HyperVM


you can upgrade anything from above list .

$5 extra for whmReseller
Extra RAM: $5 per
Extra Disk Space: $2 per GB
cPanel + Fantastico: Free
DirectAdmin: $5 per month
WHMCS: $14 Per Month
Operating System: Free Linux
Full Management: Full Management Included for Free
IP Addresses: $2 per extra

 

In other words; you aren't interested in helping, you just want to sell him hosting.

 

another lag, during the day.
Another complain to the webhost and
their standard response. (my query in red)


I revised your ticketing history and the #233119 ticket in particular and noticed that one of my colleagues has already explained the reasons for this problem.

You keep on claiming that it is a problem with my scripts and applications, so which script is the problematic one?

It is the vBulletin application, which you have been referred to.

I don\'t understand why a forum on a rival web host with 800-1000 CONCURRENT users on a non-VPS account can function as per normal while my forum running on your VPS cannot handle 50 concurrent users.

This depends not only on the number of visitors, but on the the application itself as well, i.e. how it is configured, do you have any changes on it, how it is structured, etc. That is why, you have been advised to contact a professional developer in order to revise your application and provide you with an appropriate solution or at least a professional opinion.

Seems like they are just pushing the envelope and not really making an effort here.
What should i do?

I realise that you all have fantastic webhosts and all, and in honesty, i am taking all your considerations on board, but if possible, i would want to make the webhost accountable, rather than just switching over to whatever some of you are trying to sell/recommend me.