Hi,
After yet more down time with my
VPS Hosting (which seems to require restarting about 3 times per day) I'm considering a move back to shared hosting.
Basically it seems like my
VPS Hosting has never been able to handle running any kind of MSSQL database-driven
website hosting - it just grinds to a hault with the lightest of usage. I set up a monitoring service (pingdom.com) to notify me of downtime on several of my
VPS Hosting-hosted domains, and it's sending me numerous down-time alerts throughout the day - some of which appear to be resolved before I can witness the down time, some do show the
website hosting being completely unavailable and require me to restart the
VPS Hosting.
It's getting to the stage that if I'm not in the office 24 hrs a day, the
VPS Hosting goes down and stays down. I thought that the
VPS Hosting monitoring offered by EUKHost would include the services running under my
VPS Hosting, but apparently (according to support this morning) it doesn't - so I basically need to be here 24/7 to monitor the services and restart when it grinds to a hault. What a nightmare.
Anyhow, having run all of these exact same
website hostings symultaneously (plus about 200% more sites) on a shared server elsewhere, I never ever had these problems. The only reason I moved is because my previous shared hosts didn't offer guaranteed back-ups, which is something I really need (rather than having to FTP everything and run SQL Server back-ups every day or so manually).
VPS Hosting is billed as the next stage up from shared hosting so if anything I thought it might be slightly faster and even more stable, but so far the only benefit has been that I can install my own components, which were atually installed on the shared server anyway! In every other respect is compares dramatically unfavourably.
So, question is, is anyone else finding that they'd wished they'd stayed with shared hosting? Has anyone tried EUKHost's shared hosting? How reliable/powerful is it? I notice there are loads of down-time complaints in the forums, but I guess most people only post when they're unhappy with something so that's probably skewed. Are you able to run MSSQL applications without it bailing out on EUKHost shared servers?
Of course dedicated hosting is also billed to be better, but the specification of the
dedicated servers is very similar to those of the
VPS Hosting (e.g. similar memory etc) so I'd only imagine they'd compare similarly to
VPS Hosting, only without possible interference from other users as they're not in any way shared. I wouldn't be keen to double or triple my costs to get something that still can't run a SQL Server database reliably.
Are there any non-EUKHost staff who have any direct experience in dealing with shared/
VPS Hosting/dedicated, and can compare them? I'm genuinely interested/concerned and could do with an impartial view on it. I'm also getting to the end of my patience with
VPS Hosting - it's turning into a nightmare. I'm not blaming EUKHost - it's probably my fault for not realising that
VPS Hosting's aren't powerful enough to run things like MSSQL very well, but I'd just like to hear from people who have similar experiences across different hosting types for reassurance. It's obviously a huge pain in the butt to move multiple
website hostings, so I'd rather make sure the chosen platform is right before doing so again.
Thanks folks...