|
The problem is the word 'cheap'.
Sadly, as the web world moves towards dynamic sites the commoditised box stuffers are, well... stuffed.
Here's how the business model works:
Take one cheap server and have up to 1000 websites on it. Each is paying about £7 a month for the priviledge. That's £7000 a month for a highish spec machine - nice profit margin.
About 90% of websites never get more than about 30 visits a day, so for 900 of those sites you can expect no more than about 30,000 visits. Very easy for a good server to manage.
The remaining 10% probably still only manage about 30,000 visits a day between them. 60,000 visits a day... perfectly serviceable.
All those accounts have unlimited or very high bandwidth. No problem because if any do get a busy day their sites won't be fast enough to serve that much data anyway.
But here's the problem... serving 1000 simple html websites from a single, quite cheap box is very easy. Serving dynamic sites, however, requires altogether different solutions. Many of the hosting companies (the stuffers anyway) didn't anticipate the new trends. The databases always live on special database servers and are supposedly scalable, but the php still runs on the main machine. As dynamic sites don't cache terribly well, the result is that the server load increases. Given that the desire of a box stuffer is to keep their server running as close to 100% (sweat those assets man!) there's little scope for busy periods. Reliability also suffers as the machines are hot and frantic.
So you end up with poor response times and servers going down. We moved one client from a box stuffer because after going to a dynamic site response times went from around 800ms average to nearly 2000ms... but with peaks of over 9000ms (9s). Downtime was also around the 4% mark for the month we measured. That's simply unacceptable.
My own view of 1and1 is that they sweat their servers too much, and people like yourselves suffer the consequences. There are better hosts out there, but I wouldn't necessarily shop on price if your site is in any way critical to your business.
__________________
Link free sig, but you can check out my homepage for info!
|
Feel free to get in touch via our website we host several hundred members here and they are all very happy with the service provided.
Linear Mode
