My Thoughts on X10 Free Hosting Since The "Big Move"

[pentium42006]

Anyone who frequents these forums (which is pretty much all of us) knows that X10 just came off of a big data center move. This move was intended to increase server reliability for X10's users, which I believe overall it has - somewhat.

What I'm talking about is the reliability of the free servers. Right after the move, I noticed a huge increase in speed and uptime. But it's been a few weeks since the move and well, I'd say things are back to the same as before in some cases. Before the move, it wasn't uncommon for me to experience days without a site. Now, while my site is still up, it's extremely slow, often taken 10 - 15+ seconds to load a page (Wordpress site).

I'm curious how the servers are able to become this slow? I've had my account suspended a couple of times in the past for high server usage when messing around with Wordpress a little too vigorously - often receiving the suspension within minutes. If I'm thinking this out correctly, if everyone had their accounts suspended this quickly, the servers shouldn't be slow, right? The only other thought I had is that maybe the free servers are being "over-sold", allowing creation of more account than the servers should handle.

And before you start telling me "switch to paid hosting if you want stability in your site", I know. This post isn't intended to bash free hosting or start a "well upgrade to paid hosting" argument, just the writing of a thought I had.

I'm probably not the best person to really know what is all involved in maintaining X10 servers but just some food for thought.

 

[carl6969]

As you seem to be well aware, the free hosting is simply not going to perform as well as paid services. There are a lot of reasons for that, not the least of which is the fact that the free servers have many more users on each server than the paid servers which causes very heavy loads which can result in slowness. The free servers are much more likely to be either intentionally or inadvertently abused which causes server issues despite the fact that numerous safeguards are in place to protect against that. Quickly suspending accounts which are exceeding resource limitations does nothing to ease the normal heavy load on the free servers. IMHO the free servers perform very well considering the loads and other problems they are subjected to.

 

[Corey]

We're working on a way to fix this, specifically switching the free servers to "CloudLinux". Because of our unique setup it's not easily done and we've been working with the developers for the past two weeks on getting it to work(Mostly on Stoli). If we can get this working it will put a hard limit on the amount of resources each user is allowed, also preventing the high resource usage suspensions. Right now a user can take over all processors on a server for a short period of time before a suspension kicks in. It can take 20 minutes for the server to fully recover from this because of the hundreds of processes that were waiting for CPU time.

Unfortunately it's the way free hosting works, the only alternative is to severely limit the features we offer so people are not able to abuse them. This is normally what other free hosts do. We're hoping for a good outcome with cloudlinux this week and once we know something we'll update everyone in the news.

On another note, we'll be terminating about 20,000 inactive accounts - this should speed somethings up.

 

[pentium42006]

Thanks for the update Corey!

I'm happy to know that a permanent fix is in the works.

 

[Livewire]

Thanks for the update Corey!

I'm happy to know that a permanent fix is in the works.

As are hundreds of others I imagine - I'm looking forward to the no more high-resource-usage suspensions personally, because those are often hard to determine -what- is actually causing the issues

 

[callumacrae]

As are hundreds of others I imagine - I'm looking forward to the no more high-resource-usage suspensions personally, because those are often hard to determine -what- is actually causing the issues

Although about 90% of those suspensions are usind Wordpress XD

~Callum

 

[carl6969]

Although about 90% of those suspensions are usind Wordpress XD
~Callum

I don't think that most folks realize that Wordpress is a bit of a resource hog. And if you start using some the add ons you can get yourself in trouble pretty quick.

 

[callumacrae]

I don't think that most folks realize that Wordpress is a bit of a resource hog. And if you start using some the add ons you can get yourself in trouble pretty quick.

I'm using Wordpress, and I haven't had any problems with it. It's adding tonnes of widgets to the admin thing that kills it - they all load at once, putting loads of strain on the server, etc etc. I only have the advanced stats thing

~Callum

 

[carl6969]

I'm using Wordpress, and I haven't had any problems with it. It's adding tonnes of widgets to the admin thing that kills it - they all load at once, putting loads of strain on the server, etc etc.

I guess that is what I was thinking of. I seem to recall quite a few suspension issues being resolved by "stripping down" Wordpress installations. I have several Wordpress installations here and there that have never gave me any grief, but they are all very basic with no add ons or widgets of any kind.