difference between free hosting and paid version?

[adamant]

Heya, I've been using your free hosting offer for some time now to run an SMF forum and apart from some (MySQL) hickups it's been working fine, especially as it's free I don't get to complain

However, at times my forum just loads slow or seems to be 'gone' and is then back a few minutes later, this is confirmed by friends who visit the forum at the same time. Is this a temporary thing (due to the SQL upgrades of late) or can I expect this to be a normal thing to happen? Would moving from a free to a paid hosting plan change or solve this?

Thanks.

 

[ah-blabla]

I think paid hosting probably gives you better service, in that the server doesn't have short/temporary outages and so on, but I can't guarantee that that is true... (Somewhere I read that Apache, the web server X10 uses, has to be restarted each time there's a new user added, which could be linked to those outages.) Seeing as X10's free hosting service is already so good, I suspect the paid service is even better... Maybe a paid user could comment?

 

[stpvoice]

The main differences between free and paid are:

-Paid has a 99% uptime guarantee.
-Dedicated support.
-More disk space.
-More bandwidth
-More MySQL databases
-More add-on, parked and subdomains etc.

 

[jtwhite]

I think paid hosting probably gives you better service, in that the server doesn't have short/temporary outages and so on, but I can't guarantee that that is true... (Somewhere I read that Apache, the web server X10 uses, has to be restarted each time there's a new user added, which could be linked to those outages.) Seeing as X10's free hosting service is already so good, I suspect the paid service is even better... Maybe a paid user could comment?

I have a paid account for my blog. I've never experienced any slowness/downtime. It's great and I would recommend it.

x10hosting may have a different set up, but generally, Apache does have to be restarted anytime a virtual host is added. I believe WHM (Web Host Manager; the cPanel control panel) does a "gentle" restart, which doesn't drop any connections. However, I'm not totally sure how that works.

 

[felabria]

The main differences between free and paid are:

-Paid has a 99% uptime guarantee.
-Dedicated support.
-More disk space.
-More bandwidth
-More MySQL databases
-More add-on, parked and subdomains etc.

most times a paid service has free 1st domain

 

[Anna]

Paid in general suffers less problems, one key reason to this is there's fewer accounts on each server. Also there's less abuse on paid accounts, due to the fact they have to pay to use the service (accounts that do abuse the service gets suspended, but in a short period of time before suspension is in place it may cause some issues on the server, like slowness).

I've also read somewhere that apache needs restarted when a new account (virtual host) is added, I don't know for sure how either, but a gentle restart does seem like the logical option. In any case the process of adding new accounts are automated on free, while I think they are manual on paid, which means administrators probably can control these restarts better on the paid servers.

As mentioned the paid service comes with an uptime guarantee.

 

[adamant]

Paid in general suffers less problems, one key reason to this is there's fewer accounts on each server. Also there's less abuse on paid accounts, due to the fact they have to pay to use the service (accounts that do abuse the service gets suspended, but in a short period of time before suspension is in place it may cause some issues on the server, like slowness).

I've also read somewhere that apache needs restarted when a new account (virtual host) is added, I don't know for sure how either, but a gentle restart does seem like the logical option. In any case the process of adding new accounts are automated on free, while I think they are manual on paid, which means administrators probably can control these restarts better on the paid servers.

As mentioned the paid service comes with an uptime guarantee.

Thank you, I guess that answers my question really. More than the "guaranteed uptime" it's actually the "less issues per customer and less customers per server" that makes sense to me. Reassuring that, if my forum would become more important (which it should), I have the option of upgrading to a better service that actually IS a better service.

Thank you.

 

[stpvoice]

An apache restart is not as drastic as it sounds....it just involves clicking a button and then after a few seconds it's restarted. The chances are the signup queue lowers the number of times this happens, as probably a few accounts are added, and then the apache is restarted, rather than doing it for every one.