Speed of site access

[roddy]

Just a quick poll out of curiosity. Any further comments can go below if you like.

[gato]

The database seems to time out quite a bit, maybe four, five times a month. Any one else experiencing that?

[imron]

Yep. A least that often, if not more.

[Kenny同志]

Same here.

[gato]

I've had good experience with ICDSoft in Hong Kong for hosting a website if you are thinking of switching. They offer good speed for connecting to both China and elsewhere and have pretty good uptime.

http://www2.icdsoft.com/hosting.php

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/17737-reliable-server-providers-outside-mainland-china&highlight=hosting

Reliable server providers outside mainland China?

[Daan]

The database does seem to have its problems now and then, but when the site is running normally, it's always lightning-fast for me here in Taiwan. And I can't recall ever having had issues in the Netherlands, either.

[liuzhou]

I voted for "fast" as it usually is, but as others have noted the database error has been quite common.

Wanders off singing the Small Faces "All or Nothing!"

[xianhua]

Wanders off singing the Small Faces "All or Nothing!"

Much more tactful than singing 'Whatcha Gonna Do About It' I guess.

[AxelManbow]

I have the odd page that fails to load, but very occasional.

@gato - I'm not a fan of ICDSoft. When a site I'm involved with, Dalian Dalian, was featured on danwei.org the pickup in traffic caused ICD to take the site down without any notice, despite it being within account quotas, which was a shame as up to then, for small support issues, they'd been rather good.

[gato]

Hmm, did they give any explanation? Have you moved to another hosting company?

[liuzhou]

Nice one, xianhua!

brought a smile to my miserable face on an otherwise 'orrible day!

[AxelManbow]

@gato A sudden pick up in traffic caused our account to take up too many server resources, that was the reason they provided. But the way it was handled was disappointing - immediate suspension, no clear reason given, and being within all quantified resource limits in the contract they still wouldn't put us back up. But from what I understand, many shared hosting providers behave in a similar way when hitting limits.

We're now on a VPS through Rimuhosting, which is great, as Xen means resources are guaranteed, and their support is very good.

[gato]

Virtual Private Server sounds great and not too expensive at $20-30 a month.

[imron]

I second Rimuhosting. They're fantastic, and have excellent support.

[imron]

So can we take this poll off the main page now? It's getting in the way of recent posts

[roddy]

Done. Thanks for responses. A move to a VPS is on the cards, hopefully in the not too distant future.

Overall that's pretty good I think - over 60% rating the site as fast or super fast, 95% as average or better. 'Course, people who find the site painfully slow are unlikely to wait for the poll to load.

[icdsoft]

Greetings to all,

I'm not a fan of ICDSoft. When a site I'm involved with, Dalian Dalian, was featured on danwei.org the pickup in traffic caused ICD to take the site down without any notice, despite it being within account quotas, which was a shame as up to then, for small support issues, they'd been rather good.

Looking from the side of the affected customer, it is normal to find an account suspension without a prior notice disappointing.

We are truly sorry that a customer of ours feels bad about our service. However, for the sake of truth, we believe that we must mention more facts about the particular incident.

There are two separate highload incidents with daliandalian.com back in 2008, and it seems that AxelManbow refers to the first one from September 2008 (danwei.org involved), when the account started to consume too much server resources. So here are more details:

- the activity on the account affected the normal operation of the shared hosting server, thus bringing downtime for all users on it

- the account was not suspended, but limited. Its allowed processes and memory allocation were decreased to half the standard limits

- the traffic increase mentioned was rather narrow (about 30-40%), and the number of visitors was not increased

- we issued an email notice to the customer right after we imposed the limits

- in a following support request, we provided a statistics for the CPU usage of the account

- the account limits were returned back to normal 24 hours after their imposing, when the customer reported the matter as solved.

We understand that it is better for the affected customer to be warned beforehand and to have some time to solve the problem, but this "time" would be a time of downtime or other problems for the rest of the users on the same server. If you are a shared hosting customer, your site is slow or not responding, and you get a response from your host: "Another site on the same server is loading the machine, and we are waiting for its owner to solve the problem" - we suppose that you will not be happy at all. Therefore, our choice is to ensure the proper operation of the server first, and then to arrange the matter with the owner of the offending site.

Best,

ICDSoft Team

[gato]

That's fair enough. If I were running a hosting company, I'd probably err on the side imposing limits on high-load sites on shared servers too early rather than too late, too.

On the site access speed issue, you can find out how fast the access is from locations worldwide on http://www.just-ping.com/index.php?vh=chinese-forums.com&c=&s=ping!&vtt=1263446121&vhost=_&c=

See attached screenshot for a test I just did. Seems that access is the fastest from London. Hmm.

[roddy]

Is anyone finding the site painfully slow or just plain inaccessible at the moment? I'm finding I have to fire up the VPN a lot.

[roddy]

Anyone noticing any differences in speed after the server move? I'd say I find it quite a bit smoother, but I'm perhaps biased.

The database errors should now be a thing of the past, and if they do crop up there's a much better chance of being able to do something about them.