I’ve been thoroughly testing the current host for sinsearch.co.uk site sits on; cirtexhosting.com and now I have some results. As a part of the test I am using an external ping service that checks to see if the server is down every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day.
In the last 7 days alone the server has gone down 3 times and once for 1 hour (2 consecutive pings). I am on the most stable server they have after I had a polite conversation with them – I can do polite and nice, sometimes!
Even so, despite the server being the most stable its still went down 3 times and was off line perhaps 2 hours last week in total. If you compared that with the more expensive directory host that has propably had a total down time of 10 minutes in the past 12 months.
The expensive host, exmasters charge 30cents per gig, where as Citrex is only charging a tiny fraction of that, which is actually less than the wholesale price! So, you ask how do they still in business. Well, they affectively sell you bandwidth they dont have and restrict or throttle their servers to prevent accounts getting anywhere near the bandwidth you thought you signed up for.
This rather dubious practise is often referred to as “over selling” because they have actually sold the bandwith they sold you to several other people too! Over-selling can work for some industries, but only works if a large proportion of its customers don’t use much bandwidth. The adult industry though consumes a huge amount of bandwidth and all the sites do and so the server just runs out of resources; sites stop loading and people like me start swearing.
I was going to host a friends site too to help her out but I cannot possibly recommend Citrex to her as she’ll cut my balls off amonst other things! In addition it is begining to look like the host isn’t even going to be capable of running the UK version of sinsearch.com at all. So, I am going to look for a new host just for this site. I reckon something in the region of 50gig of bandwidth would be okay and perhaps combine that with another site or so.
So, I am looking for a host that accepts model/promotional or erotic/adult themed content and imaginary that offers unlimited or at least a substantial number of databases and unlimited sub-account or add-on domains. These silly offers that set limits like 10 or 1 or 3 are just taking the wee as ALL Linux servers can take an unlimited number. The hosts are just trying to make you upgrade, to pay more for resources you’ll never use!
My hosting search continues on another day…
