Vidahost website being down is raising questions for me

[3 MORE YEARS]

Hello Everyone,

I need some advice from knowledgeable people out there.

I have been a customer of Vodahosts for about 10 years I think. I have several accounts and packages with them. These are all low traffic websites, small business stuff. Nevertheless they are important to my business. On the whole I have been pleased with them. They have had a few episodes of downtime over the year. But the downtime of one of their servers of the last 2 days has meant one of my most important sites is still down. I originally joined Vidahost because the support was excellent, and the owners Seb and Dominic (I think they were owners) always did their best to solve problems, so I tried to stay loyal. I think I saw them on this forum a few times. However, the support on my first call today was terrible. The guy got the info wrong, worst still, he couldn't even tell me if it was going to be down for a few days, a week, a month or a year! Even then I tried to stay calm and see if i could get some information out of him.

Now, we are a small tiny business. And we mainly use wordpress sites. Very basic stuff. And I am told there is no such thing as 100% uptime guarantee. However, I am curious to know if some of those specialist wordpress hosting companies are any more reliable. Because I need to seriously consider changing hosting as I will be working on some important sites soon, and I wouldn't like them to be down much. Any advice is welcome. Thanks.

 

[ryedale]

It's always a challenge for a smaller hosting specialist to manage growth so that the same level of support can always be maintained.

A lot of companies are tempted to try and get as many people on board by reducing prices well below the industry standard. It can help with initial growth but very often the support requirements very quickly out-paces the recruitment of quality support staff and the level of service gets diluted. It happens time and time again.

From our perspective as a specialist provider, I've always worked with the approach that everyone in the team should know exactly who every client is and what types of sites they are hosting without having to look up their details. If that one to one knowledge stops happening then it would be time to reassess our approach. I think it's the same for many of the other users on here who provide specialist services.

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

Hi Ryedale thanks. What you say makes sense, I see it all industries. However, I was thinking of a situation, and since you are in the hosting business, you can tell if it work or not.

Say I have 2 hosting accounts with 2 different hosting companies. They are both cPanel, as thats what I am used to. I am going to for now assume that we are dealing with Wordpress sites. So if I had my site hosted with "Hosting Company A", and I made a automatic backup using one of those Wordpress backup companies like "Vaultpress", then lets say if "Hosting Company A" server was to go down, could I quickly restore the site onto "Hosting Company B". I would have added all my domains etc to "Hosting Company B" months in advance, as I would be using "Hosting Company B" as my backup server, in case the first hosting company went down. So I assume I would just have change the name servers, and tell Vaultpress where to restore my site and the database, correct?

Please let me know if this will work? Do you see any possible issues as Wordpress is database driven. To me the cost would be worth 2 hosting accounts if it meant having a few minutes or an hour of downtime as opposed to possible days.

 

[ryedale]

Hi

Well it depends how time critical your site is really - you'd have to allow time for DNS propagation which whilst being a lot quicker these days, can still be delayed with some hosts into hours or even days.

It depends on how frequently your database and site are backed up as well as to whether the backed up copy is up to date.

If the servers provide your mail services as well, then you may get a cross over of email going to two different servers depending on which MX records are picked up

You could look at using a service like Cloudflare which can serve up a cached copy of your site if your main server is down until your server comes back up again.

 

[arnydnxluk]

I see you have mentioned cPanel hosting. Have you considered switching to Vida's clustered hosting? Every service on there is spread across multiple servers, allowing them to withstand downtime related issues more easily.

To be honest, the issues you're having with their support has been commonly voiced across forums this year. It seems since Vida/TSO were acquired by HEG back in November, more support has been moved offshore and the overall support quality has decreased.

Beware that often you will see hosting providers "specialising" in WordPress but this isn't always the case, often it's just clever marketing and sales tactics. That being said, there are some genuine specialist services out there such as https://kinsta.com. Just be sure to do your research and find out what they're offering you above and beyond a good shared hosting provider or fully managed VPS.

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

Hi, Thanks for your response. My email is with Google Apps for Business so I don't think I need to worry there. I also know enough about DNS propagation. Nowadays, it goes through in couple of hours. Even when it takes time, it doesn't take that long. The websites are not updated daily. Even if they are, I can have daily backups. So worst case scenario I will lose one day of work. I can live with that as long as my above plan with 2 hosting companies will work.

The Cloudflare thing is interesting. However, given the fact that I manage 20 plus sites it will be too expensive and my solution will be a lot cheaper. Thanks.

 

[ryedale]

Cloudflare is free for the basic plan which caches sites

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

Thanks Mike. I didn't know that Vidahost's ownership has changed. It all makes sense now. I did look at clustered hosting from Vidahost a few years ago, but I then found out that it wasn't cPanel, so I abandoned it. I have been using cPanel for so many years now, and I don't feel like going through a new learning curve. I don't think their clustered hosting is cPanel, unless I am looking at the wrong page.

 

[webhostuk]

I am not a great fan of cloudflare most of the times they don't show latest website contain , mostly keeps the cache contain for long time, which is not that good for business important website. A good SSD shared hosting with nginx webserver can give you fast performance and good service. And cloudflare has always been ISIS hacker target if you read =about them and that too quit often.

 

[ryedale]

Well I think obviously having a host with a good server set up is the OPs primary concern. We've always found CF to be an excellent solution to work in tandem with that - guess it depends on how you configure it

 

[KM-Tiger]

I also know enough about DNS propagation. Nowadays, it goes through in couple of hours. Even when it takes time, it doesn't take that long.

With respect you don't know enough if you think it's quicker nowadays. DNS has not changed in how it works.

Getting it to change quickly is solely dependent on reducing the TTL to a short period, and doing that a greater period of time in advance than the current TTL.

 

[ryedale]

Some ISPs also completely ignore TTL

In reality imo, a decent host with good support isn't going to be down for a sufficient period of time to make it worth all the hassle of switching DNS over and restoring backups and then switching back again.

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

For better reliability and performance one of the best things you can do is do away with spinning disks. That applies whether its your laptop, or a server.
SSD storage is far superior to disk storage. As far as I'm aware, your current host don't do pure SSD hosting.

So switching to a host that provides pure SSD storage will certainly help.

Another key element for performance is the web server. Ngnix as mentioned, or LiteSpeed will perform far better than standard Apache.

WordPress is PHP driven, and LiteSpeed web server can process PHP up to 50% faster.

The other key driver for reliability is the number of users on the server, and obviously how well maintained it is.

The more users for a set amount of resources, the lower the performance, greater the strain, and greater the chance of issues or problems with neighbours - much like an apartment building.

Unfortunately the very large hosts - such as the Host Europe Group brands - who own 123-Reg, and since last year, your host as well, run the equivalent of rickety old diesel busses that they try to cram as full as possible to make as much money as possible.

Because they have shareholder pressure and very large marketing spends, and chase the mass consumer market, they really have to sweat their assets.

So rather than modern, uncrowded pure SSD servers, you end up with years old disk based servers with far too many users on.

That can't perform well or reliably.

You're best off investing in a business hosting package from a decent, UK based host.
You'll then get far better performance and reliability, which go hand in hand really.

Most decent hosts will provide a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and will typically far exceed that.

Personally I think "cloud" solutions are pretty meaningless below the VPS level, and are more of a marketing gimmick. Your current hosts cloud solution has from what I've seen and seen reported by other UKBF members, performed less reliably and with more downtime than good quality cPanel hosting.

So I'd just switch to a good quality UK web hosting provider, that uses pure SSD storage.
And by all means you can compliment that with CloudFlare as well if you like.
Some providers even include a wizard to add CloudFlare for free with a few clicks.

For uptime you'll be better off spending on one higher quality package from a high quality web host, than two lesser packages from different hosts.

I hope that helps

If you have any questions feel free to get in touch,

Dan

 

[Edith@TerraNetwork]

A lot of good advice on this thread, and I agree with vts that a good host will resolve the error in a much shorter time period than DNS propagation would take. Switching suppliers should be your fall back plan if all goes wrong; but a good host should mean you don't need to use it.

CloudFlare I have mixed feelings about, the paid service for clients who require DDOS protection appears to work well, but I haven't seen any real benefit in the free caching service.

As for uptime, have a look at hosts who have their uptime independently monitored on port 80 (HTTP), this will tell you the time the server was reliably online. Be wary of "network uptime" as the network could be up, even if HTTP is down.

Edith

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

Okay, can you guys recommend some good hosting solutions that use SSD's on cPanel? Please bear in mind this is a small business, with extremely low traffic websites. So £200 per month per site is out of the question. I need a hosting in the UK, and one in the US, if Google still takes server location into account on SEO. Any recommendations will be welcome. Thanks.

 

[KM-Tiger]

Another key element for performance is the web server. Ngnix as mentioned, or LiteSpeed will perform far better than standard Apache.

WordPress is PHP driven, and LiteSpeed web server can process PHP up to 50% faster.

It depends what you mean by 'standard Apache'. If you mean pre-fork with mod_php, then yes it will be slow, but it can be set up to use php-fpm, preferably via a Unix socket, and that will make it fast.

The other aspect of things for Wordpress is speed of database access. There is a lot that can be done to optimise MySQL. The 'out of the box' setting are very conservative.

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

I see you have mentioned cPanel hosting. Have you considered switching to Vida's clustered hosting? Every service on there is spread across multiple servers, allowing them to withstand downtime related issues more easily.

To be honest, the issues you're having with their support has been commonly voiced across forums this year. It seems since Vida/TSO were acquired by HEG back in November, more support has been moved offshore and the overall support quality has decreased.

Beware that often you will see hosting providers "specialising" in WordPress but this isn't always the case, often it's just clever marketing and sales tactics. That being said, there are some genuine specialist services out there such as https://kinsta.com. Just be sure to do your research and find out what they're offering you above and beyond a good shared hosting provider or fully managed VPS.

Hi Mike, How well do you know Kinsta? Do you have any personal interest in recommending them? I don't mind if you do, I would just like to know. I also checked out your site, you say that you do SSD hosting as well, its on cPanel right?

Also, does anyone know if Vidahosts standard shared hosting uses SSD. I just looked through their website trying find any mention of SSD, and I couldn't find anything on shared plans.

I know my MacBooks have been much more reliable since moving to SSD version, so I assume it should help in terms of reliability by going SSD on hosting. I hate having to move hosting. Every time I have moved hosting, finding a good hosting company that I can trust has always been a struggle.

 

[arnydnxluk]

I have been using cPanel for so many years now, and I don't feel like going through a new learning curve. I don't think their clustered hosting is cPanel, unless I am looking at the wrong page.

You're right, it's their own control panel. Looks like this: http://comcopy.co.uk/images/vidahost-website-migration-02.png

It's not a terrible control panel but I can understand why you don't want to learn something new when you already know cPanel. Besides, it's not as feature complete as cPanel and it can create a "lock-in" effect because any migration to/from their control panel has to be done manually.

Hi Mike, How well do you know Kinsta? Do you have any personal interest in recommending them? I don't mind if you do, I would just like to know.

Sorry, I was just mentioning them as an example. I have never used Kinsta so I cannot recommend them. I do know their service focuses solely on WordPress hosting which would make them a "true" WordPress specialist. I only know of Kinsta because I've been following the founder & CEO Mark over on Twitter for the past few years!

I also checked out your site, you say that you do SSD hosting as well, its on cPanel right?

Correct. Please feel free to email me directly mike [at] ngagehosting.uk or use the contact form on our website to open a sales ticket if you have any questions.

Also, does anyone know if Vidahosts standard shared hosting uses SSD. I just looked through their website trying find any mention of SSD, and I couldn't find anything on shared plans.

I doubt it, it's not mentioned on their website anywhere. Given they name their cPanel hosting "legacy hosting", I would imagine they're maintaining older servers but would rather customers move onto their cloud hosting.

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

Hi Mike, I will email you later tonight possibly as I am interested to know about some of your plans. I have been researching online about Kinsta, so far I have only heard really good stuff, hence why I asked how you know them. I am considering taking 2 hosting accounts, one with a company like Kinsta, and one maybe with your company. I don't know much about your company, so I haven't decided yet. But I have 10-20 websites that I need to host. So a combination of Kinsta and something like your shared plans if its with SSD will make it more affordable for me. I would want to complement the wordpress sites with a backup solution like CodeGuard. I'll email you later with my questions. Thanks for now.

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

Anyone who is considering using Vidahost should take my experience as a warning to stay a million miles away. They are worse then terrible at the moment.

It took them 3 days to get things working, but even after 3 days we don't have a website. Because they don't have a backup to restore from. They said they do daily backups. Thats complete rubbish because they could not restore our website. Aparantly its because of the theme we were using. So lets blame the theme for a second. So even if the theme is at fault, then at least you should be able to restore the website, and we could use any of the other themes which are already installed on this website. So we have no website, all the pages that existed before are missing. So in short we don't have a website. This is what we get for being a customer a good 10 years.

 

[woodss]

Don't you have a backup of it yourself which you can upload?

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

Don't you have a backup of it yourself which you can upload?

Yes I do. But its quite old. I am angry at myself for becoming to reliant on my hosting company.

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

We've just migrated another client from them today.

Unfortunately for their customers they've been on a spending spree, I lose track of the number of hosts they've been acquiring. Meanwhile it seems providing a dependable and reliable service gets forgotten.

We're obviously biased, but generally recommend a medium sized host if you want reliable hosting with good service. When a host gets too large service just can't scale properly with it.
Buyouts, shareholder pressure and maintaining old infrastructure certainly don't help though. And much can be simply explained by their new owners.

If you have multiple websites, whoever you choose I wouldn't recommend normal shared hosting - certainly not putting multiple websites in a single cPanel if that's what you intend.

That's bad for security and performance. You should be able to find decent UK based reseller or eCommerce hosting, where you can have each website sit in its own cPanel account (providing account separation) within a modest budget.

If you do a search on these forums you should find some recommendations, hopefully including us!

For WordPress, much of the marketing around specialising and optimisation is a gimmick. Decent modern hosting should be optimised to run database intensive platforms like WordPress - and its technology - MySQL and PHP, is standard, so any good Linux/cPanel host that takes performance seriously would have optimised for that.

Again SSD storage will make a big difference for database driven platforms like WordPress.

Where specialisation can help though is with support. It certainly helps to have a host that knows how WordPress works, can recommend plugins, help with your .htacess file, manual security hardening, and common issues. WordPress is by far the most common platform we host, and our clients certainly appreciate when we help with those aspects. Building websites in WordPress certainly helps us deliver that support.

So you may want to look for a host that either hosts a lot of WordPress sites, or develops using the platform.

Best of luck,

Dan

 

[Jolt.co.uk]

Yes I do. But its quite old. I am angry at myself for becoming to reliant on my hosting company.

Sometimes the painful lessons are the ones that we learn the most from.

There's been some good advice in this thread so far, mostly from some members that run hosting companies and want a chance to expose their signature. You can probably say the same by us responding here but I'll share some additional advice that you can combine into your check list as you determine future service providers to work with.

1) How long have they been in business?
2) Are they a real business? Registered at Companies House with active accounts with more than a nominal worth? VAT registered?
3) Are they owner owned / ran or do they have a support team? In-house or outsourced? 24x7?
4) ALWAYS keep your own backups
5) On top of your own backups, what backups does your hosting company take?
6) Do they run their own servers, network, etc? Or are they just renting dedicated servers from other providers? You want to make sure they're not a fly by night so if the latter (there's nothing wrong with it), make sure you do your due diligence to ensure they won't disappear overnight
7) SSD is important but not the be all and end all. Consider SSD in the greater scheme of the total server specification. And are these enterprise grade servers / SSDs or consumer SSDs that will actually fail more quickly than a regular spinning disk?
8) Always keep more of your own backups!
9) Using multiple providers / not putting all of your eggs in one basket is a good idea

 

[UKSBD]

Trouble is they all get taken over

I have used 4 or 5 different hosts over the years and at least 3 of them have now been taken over by HEG or Iomart

 

[Jolt.co.uk]

A lot do but some established, mature providers who continue to put customer service first still exist. A few participate here, others don't but still provide a respectable service.

 

[Ian J]

Anyone who is considering using Vidahost should take my experience as a warning to stay a million miles away. They are worse then terrible at the moment.

Like yourself I have several websites that have been with Compila for a dozen or more years and which are now part of the Vidahost empire since the takeover a year or two ago and I have always found them to be efficient and quick when sorting out problems

 

[CyberHour.com]

While is true that anyone who come with 100% uptime guarantee won't be serious the normal standards of uptime guarantee is 99.99% (well atleast with us) which means average 1 hour offtime on a given month.

Same goes for the so called unlimited/unmetered resources one pure lie from some providers.
Also avoid going with cheap hosting provider there is no great service for anything < 7-10 euro. And is hitting the bells for overselling (which lead to poor quality and unstable servers).

Look for hosting provider who can provide you with speed,security and stability which include SSD storage, Premium bandwidth and DDOS protection.

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

Thank you all, especially Jolt, thats some good advice. I have one final question for now. Does server location still have a small or big effect or SEO? Because I have a few sites I am about to launch that I want US/International focused customers rather than UK. Does anyone know for sure?

Thanks.

 

[arnydnxluk]

Does server location still have a small or big effect or SEO? Because I have a few sites I am about to launch that I want US/International focused customers rather than UK. Does anyone know for sure?

Nobody can tell you for sure because each search engine has their own rules. Google for example relies on various signals, the primary one being your domain but also the server location, information on your website and more. However, with Google, you can login to Google Search Console and tell them the correct geographic location for your website. I would expect the other major search engines to function in a similar way (choosing signals such as domain and website content over server location), which means ultimately server location should not matter for SEO.

Here's the relevant information directly from Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

How do we determine location without Search Console?

If no information is entered in Search Console, Google relies largely on the site's country domain (such as .ca, .de). If you use an international domain (.com, .org, .eu), we'll rely on several signals, including IP address, location information on the page, links to the page, and any relevant information from Google My Business. If you change hosting provider for a country domain, there should be no impact. If you change the hosting provider of an international domain to a provider in another country, we recommend using Search Console to tell us which country your site should be associated with.

 

[CyberHour.com]

I can ensure you that the location of the server is not paying any role to your local serps ranks. Google don't care if the IP on which your website is hosted is local (from the target country) or not.

This is an missleading myth going in the "Black hat" community. I will give you for example websites that are using Cloudflare for DNS proxy and CDN and they do rank #1/2/3/4 on their local serp.

What really metters is how fast your website is loading FROM the local area (your visitors come from).

So the most important factors when you are looking for hosting providers should always be #1 Speed , #2 Stability and #3 Security.

If your target country is US then you should look for hosting provider with datacenter/location in US. In order to avoid the additional latency.

Best Regards,
CyberHour

P.S: For local SEO you should use/do:
- Local domain extension (e.g .fr , .co.uk)
- Backlinks from other websites from this area and niche.
- Social Signals
- From Google Webmaster Tools to select the proper targeted country.
- Optimized website & keywords e.g Shoe store in London etc etc

 

[Jolt.co.uk]

Thank you all, especially Jolt, thats some good advice. I have one final question for now. Does server location still have a small or big effect or SEO? Because I have a few sites I am about to launch that I want US/International focused customers rather than UK. Does anyone know for sure?

Thanks.

Almost zero impact.

The biggest two factors are TLD and what you set in Google Webmaster Tools

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

Thank you all. Thats now made my selection of providers a lot easier.

 

[CyberHour.com]

You are welcome

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

Does server location still have a small or big effect or SEO? Because I have a few sites I am about to launch that I want US/International focused customers rather than UK. Does anyone know for sure?

Thanks.

What the others have indicated but haven't actually concluded or written is that the server location does have an effect on SEO.

Google takes loading times and performance into consideration for ranking.

For two otherwise equal servers, one located further away in another country, and one located for example in London, the UK server will provide lower latency, better performance, and as a result, potentially better SEO performance.

If you want to cover both the UK and the US, a way to deal with this without getting two hosting packages (one in the UK and one in the US), would be to add CloudFlare.

This is a free Content Delivery Network (CDN), and an easy way to have otherwise UK served pages served from the US - and a US IP.

Combine that with setting a US location in Webmaster Tools and you'll be well set for covering the US using UK hosting as well, while benefiting from proper UK support during your work hours - and maintenance windows that'll be while you and your visitors will be asleep, rather than in the morning (typical night time US maintenance is the morning in the UK).

 

[astutiumRob]

What the others have indicated but haven't actually concluded or written is that the server location does have an effect on SEO.

Google takes loading times and performance into consideration for ranking.

They also take into account "distance" from their network (in ASNs) which _could_ be a way of them measuring "cost" to crawl a site, with preference being to those they peer with

Bing appears to take the geo location details from the IP range into account where a domain is a GTLD rather than a ccTLD, and Google used to do the same unless it was indicated in webmastertools that the target audience was elsewhere

If you're logged into Chrome and allow it use your location, results are reordered to be more "local" (which was very evident when I was in Houston last week) and for the 1st time that I've ever seen, some searches are now taking opening-hours into account, so a search for a Taco stand during the day gave different results at night when most had closed

So a whole new dynamic to SEO for "retail" to consider.

 

[jamieclick]

Hey 3 More Years.... Did You make a move to someone else?

I currently have around 50 sites with Vida and I'm looking to move away asap.

Thanks,
Jamie