I’ve been a customer of Lunarpages for going on three years. I had no problems with downtime, storage or bandwidth. As a matter of fact I liked the service so much that I transferred all my sites that I had hosted on a reseller host to Lunarpages. The reseller host had database issues that they could never resolve. I resolved the issue by getting my sites the hell off of the host.
I spent the better part of a week transferring all the WordPress shit off that reseller host to LP. Not much fun but I got it done without too many problems. Until I get an email saying I’m using too much of the shared system resources. The CPU usage was a burly 4.91 whatever that measurement indicates. So I add WP caching to the blogs. It helps some but not enough.
So I get pissed and decide to go with the flow and host with Hostgator. Did the cheap-ass Baby Croc plan. I move a couple of the worst offending WP off of LP. We go back and forth over the last couple of weeks with me removing a blog or two and them sending me an email saying it wasn’t enough the next day after checking the stats.
So now…get this, I have fewer blogs on LP than I had before the big move. Until I moved all my sites to LP I had no problems. Pay my bill and I never heard from them. I still, STILL, apparently, use too much system resources. My blogs aren’t that popular, man.
So I look at the system tray at HostGator. You know, where it shows the CPU and Memory usage? I’m pretty paranoid about those stats now. I check them and refresh them quite a few times during the day. Nothing. They hardly budge from .1%. My heart skipped a beat when it showed a .2%. I refreshed it and it dropped back down to .1%. I’ll probably have a heart attack if it hits .5% or something.
So I’m confused. The worst of my blogs on HostGator show virtually nothing as far a CPU cycles. At least for now. LP’s servers couldn’t handle them.
On LP, as of today, the last remaining blogs are reporting 1.95. And these are original blogs that were on there before I moved everything TO Lunarpages FROM the previous reseller. I have no scripts other than WP running.
So what does that tell me? That Lunarpages sucks ass.
I knew I would like HostGator the minute I saw their cpanel. Very nice. Lunarpages doesn’t even offer AWStats. When I first got the LP hosting I didn’t realize I’d want that until I got reseller hosting elsewhere. I asked about it and they said it was too server intensive. That may be but they are like the only outfit that doesn’t bother offering it. No big deal because I use Google Analytics anyway. But still.
I have no idea if HostGator will continue to work out. I can tell you this much: I don’t plan on building many WP sites anymore. Straight HTML baby. When I need to blog then Blogger is going to get my business. Or I will go back to using Pivot.
{ 30 comments… read them below or add one }
General advice – Splork – make the staff at your host your friends, ass sucking stops immediately…
I only have one Wordpress blog these days and I know that having it means that any day it will be hacked or spammed to death or whatever. That’s the way of the world with blogs these days.
I gradually changed over all my sites to straight html with a feed page to keep it dynamic and wow, do they perform better. I’m sorry to hear that Lpages was so clueless – seems like they were punishing you for having successful blogs or something. Anyway, best of luck with this new hostgator hosting – hopefully all will go well.
I like Hostgator. There support is great! And I have never had any downtime. I have recently just added Hostprise to my list of reseller accounts. Their small reseller package is only $10 a month and it is not as big as Hostgators bandwidth but I figure at this price I could have multiple reseller accounts with different IPs. This is a definite plus for linking. So far their support is awesome also.
I had to look up Pivot to see what you were talking about.
Is this easy for a total noob to use?
I hate to say this Splork, but the issue you are having with Lunar Pages (who, I agree suck) happened to me with Hostgator (and it was on their ‘swamp croc’ account, not the baby croc).
Two blogs eating cpu, so I transferred them to another host, rather than submit to the “you must go dedicated” ‘suggestions’ from HG.
Strangely, my cpu still remained high, despite the fact that my bigger hitting blogs (and all other tools which may have caused high cpu) were now on other hosts.
To this day, I still have the odd ‘resource issue’ email from HG (and my blogs go offline for a while). Eventually I will lose them altogether, which is why I am in the midst of transferring the decent ones now.
And it’s a tiresome job, as HG are being a little awkward about allowing access to transfer.
I hear so many tales of people on shared hosting (wherever it is) that, once they have cpu problems, always have these ‘issues’, no matter what they do to put things right.
But I wish you luck with HG. Many people still speak highly of them.
Just not me, lol!
Pivot – it’s a step up in the technical know-how from WP. It’s not cookie-cutter easy to use as WP/Fantastico. It’s not difficult at all. And the install tends to be a snap. It’s just different. The problem is there aren’t near as many developers creating cool stuff like plugins and templates as there are with WP. I’ve used it since ’04 but moved most of my blogs to WP of late, much to my chagrin now. I liked being part of a small group of users and supporting the project. I’m not much for following the herd. When I do, like using WP, I tend to get lazy and uninterested.
Yea, I know Zania. It’s why I’m done with WP. I’ll try to massage the blogs I have but anything moving forward will be with Pivot or XSP or Blogger or other free hosts. I don’t want to deal with dedicated hosting right now.
I totally agree. I’ve been going strong on Hostgator for over a year with no complaints. The short time I was on Lunarpages, yes they did suck.
Hello Splork.
Love your blog.
Don’t know about LP, I have never used them. But I use HG, and they never gave me a problem. Good service, quick respons to queries.
Mind you, I tend to favor static sites to blogs so I never had those ‘CPU leech’ problems you mention.
Cheers!
Klik
Thanks klik. And those are what I favor as well.
Dan wrote: I only have one Wordpress blog these days and I know that having it means that any day it will be hacked or spammed to death or whatever. I gradually changed over all my sites to straight html with a feed page to keep it dynamic…
Can someone expand on this idea – how is it done? WordPress is certainly the 800 pound gorilla in the blogging world, but there’s a hefty learning curve, even for a long-time HTML/Scripter like me.
Re: your comment “When I need to blog then Blogger is going to get my business. ” My only concern about Blogger is that you don’t “own” your content. If Google decides to vaporize your blog, your content disappears forever. You can always make a manual backup of your posts, but not the comments; and where do you go from there in terms of a blogging platform? As usual, no easy answers.
I don’t build (most) blogs for commenting. I build them to get clicks for Adsense or affiliate offers. I don’t get attached to the Blogger blogs. If one goes away, I build another. In the last 3 months I’ve had exactly one Blogger blog trashed. That was a frankensite. I grabbed another account and built another blog just like it.
I own the content with Blogger. I just don’t own the blog. I’m creating niche sites on niche topics that mean nothing to me. I try not to get wrapped up in creating little masterpieces that I want socialized. I don’t have time for that across every blog I build.
XSP creates a feed page for your HTML site.
Splork, hosting is my area, i manage alone, 80 hosting servers. Wordpress can have that problems, specially if the server http server is compiled with SUPHP. Suphp is very cool because it protects better the accounts from hacker attacks, but it’s slow. Unfortunately, in shared hosting, we always need to compile with suphp, because of hackers attacks.
You can try to optimize your wordpress blogs, use wp super cache, and some other binary cache. That will help.
I once tried to sign up for Hostgator, but will never do so again, after they declined my signup and asked me to fax over my ID and stuff…too much hassle, and I’ve got my pride.
Apparently based on my IP…they said my IP doesn’t match my location….Geez, I use a dynamic IP for my internet connection, and never thought this could be an issue.
Hey Dinheiro. Yea I put super cache on all my blogs. It helped but I still had to yank all of them back off and onto new hosting.
SF- yea I wouldn’t have put up with that nonsense either.
Finally, PLRpro promotes your blog to the mail list. I’m just glad that your blog will become more popular, you deserve it.
Thanks Ed. I didn’t realize they were doing that.
I was with LP for a few months, my blog started to gain some popularity and then next thing you know, I was suspended. They told me that I was using too much resources. I moved to Tigersites and my WP works fine!
I would love to build simple HTML web sites versus these php sites, but they do make our lives so much easier!
I had one of my Wordpress 2.1 blogs hacked so Hostgator suspended the account and forced me to upgrade to Wordpress 2.7 which I did and everything seems to be working fine.
They did ask me to install wp super cache on all my Wordpress blogs but I am hesitant to do this because of potential conflicts with other plugins or who knows what else. Splork – have you had any problems when you installed Wordpress super cache?
Hey Splork,
I like HG as well and have never had any problems, but I keep a couple of additional accounts since I do some PPC and didn’t want all my landing pages on one host just in case. LP did not last long for me either. Same experience as you with lack of features and crappy support.
I’m thinking of moving toward more static HTML sites. Is it smooth sailing without stuff like the XML sitemap generator, dynamic internal linking and stuff?
Thanks.
Hi Splork,
If you get p.o. at Hostgator, you might try Dreamhost. I’ve been with them for a couple of years and have had no issues with them. They have a lot of bandwidth, the technical support is great and they have one-click installs for just about anything you can ask for.
Cheers,
Barry
I began using LP in (I think) ’03 because they were one of the few cheap Java hosts. I loved them for three years and still have three separate accounts with them. But they suck ass these days.
They used to get my highest recommendation and now they get my lowest. HG used to get my lowest, and now they rank among my highest (right up there with Liquid Web and iWeb).
I got one of those resource e-mails for having 2 of JP’s Niche in a Box sites on one account. I moved those two and added 18 blogs to a Bluehost account with no problems. Same with HG — I put 20 to 25 blogs on one account (I have 2 shared and 1 reseller with HG) and CPU is always at 0.1.
Ready for another shocker? Ping your LP servers and see what kind of response you get. Here’s my results running right now:
LunarPages: 101ms
HostGator: 47ms
BlueHost: 78ms
iWeb: 41ms
Shaun
Told the “Gator” was alright! (LOL!)..
And, as I mentioned in a previous post, use MyStarterBlog if you want a blog type format that is HTML based. See here..
My Starter Blog
http://www.mcgrathinfosolution.com/mystarterblog_en.htm
Demo: http://www.mcgrathinfosolution.com/msb_example/
I know you are down with XSP, but, MSB is only about seven dollars.
Key Benefits Of MSB…
* More secure since there is no backend that can be hacked
* Learn to use FTP software, HTML (posts/pages)
* Interact directly with your readers
* Use the 8 included themes that you can modify to your taste or get new ones
* Search engine friendly out of the box so that your readers can find your blog quickly
* Auto-generate the RSS feed and sitemap.xml
* Create unlimited blogs (paid version)
* Import text files in a batch to start your blog faster (paid version)
* Import your WordPress blog(XML) (paid version)
* Free Basic version(1 blog)
* Low cost paid version available with free upgrades for life
* No spyware or adware
Your call, but I am glad you made the move. Lets hope you don’t run into further problems..
On hale it up..
Robert C..
After exchanging 50 emails to the LunarPages support team, I’ve given up. I’ve even switched to a very simple theme on my blog. Still a very high CPU usage (even disabled lots of plug-ins)
I’ve been with them for years and I have to admit, their service is going downhill
I’ll consider moving to Hostgator now
Yep, sounds like you went through the same crap I did. I finally got my CPU utilization down enough to keep them from hassling me but not without having to move the blogs that were problematic to Hostgator…which is interesting because they haven’t budged the needle on the CPU utilization.
Hey Splork,
Thanks for the heads-up on Lunar Pages, I was considering using them as my current webhost only offers 500M of disc space. Anyway after reading of your experiences and others I’ll scratch them.
As for Hostgator. Well…
Despite recommendations and glowing reports from others about them I have to say that I was utterly disgusted with the treatment I received…
I signed up, paid via paypal and set up a monthly debit. I was then sent to a page instructing me on how to access my account. All great so far.
However I wasn’t able to log on and was ‘talking’ to the live chat person to find out why when she mentioned an email had been sent to me stating why. Funny that… then I noticed an email from Paypal stating my payment had been refunded.
“What?”
After another ten minutes an email arrived from Hostgator stating:
“Your account has been marked for a security verification. Because of this, in order for us to host your domain, we will require payment via bank transfer or Western Union.”
What? Why?
No reason given, just instructions how to pay by bank transfer or Western Union. A minimum payment of $100 would be required and a dire warning was given to follow the instructions ‘to the letter’ otherwise payment wouldn’t be accepted.
(If you check out the small print any bank transfers or Western Union deposits will NOT be refunded in cash. They will only by credited against Hostgator’s future ‘services’.
This means you have to pay for a year or more services upfront but have no way of getting a refund if you decide to cancel… not good that!)
And I’d been told Hostgator people were friendly! But it gets worse…
I obviously replied asking what was cooking. Their answer was: ‘they’d had too many Paypal reversals and bank chargebacks originating from China.’
UHH? So why accept the payments from here in the first place? Why not state the payment terms on the website to save misleading potential clients?
I stated as much in my return email and then asked why they were treating me like a criminal – security verification indeed – and why couldn’t they word their email in a different way that wouldn’t be so offensive?
I mean a simple “Dear Sir, we are very sorry to inform you that we have been forced to stop accepting payments via Paypal…” or words to that effect would go a long way in building customer relations and spreading the word. But you won’t believe the reply I got – I was stunned myself.
Quote:
“At no point have we stated that you are a criminal. However, as any investigator can tell you, when some one claims that they are not a criminal without being accused of being a criminal, that person is either a criminal or planning on doing something that they know to be questionable in nature.”
Can you believe that?
“We haven’t said you’re a criminal but you must be one if you ask why you are being treated so”
Anyway to cut a long story short I shall NEVER use Hostgator and am still waiting for the reply to my complaint about their attitude.
Just thought I’d let you know that all is not well in ‘Hostgator land’ either… and I’m still looking for a trustworthy webhost… sigh!
Take care,
Stuart
That sucks. Yea I’d be finding another host as well. The problem is that “getting what you pay for” is really starting to be a problem in hosting. I have no interest at this time to go to dedicate hosting. I’m just not quite at the tipping point in making money to need that. But these cheap $8/month hosting plans really blow if you add more than a few blogs on them. I’ve dropped tons of HTML websites on there. But I’ve run in into database issues to the point that I’m tired of blogs. I’ve got 6 new blogs for Blogprofitz that haven’t tipped over yet along with some older ones (like LBIHW) spread across two hosting plans, but the sites that I’ve been building lately are PGB sites or XSP sites or Hubpages. Of course some of those sites I’ve been adding a StoreStacker store off them as well, which is handled with a database. No problems yet but I don’t think SS is as db intensive as WP.
I have a shared hosting account at Mochahost with a couple of SS stores on it along with about 4 WP blogs and a static HTML site. I received a notice today that one of my SS installs was using a ton of CPU and then one of my WP blogs xmlrpc.php files was at 22%. I’m hoping the overload on the SS install has to do with the CRON jobs that are set up.
I read somewhere that you could delete the xmlrpc.php file and the blog will work fine. I’ll try to come back and post an update on what happens if I remember.