Don’t Use AN Hosting
That’s a pretty strong title for this post, but let me explain why I feel this way. Back in mid-December of 2006, I was shopping for a hosting provider for my blog, http://www.disneyfrontier.com. The site was hosted at godaddy.com on their very economical $3.99 a month plan. It had achieved some small success in terms of traffic and I was ready to upgrade to the next level of hosting (usually costing between $6 and $10 per month). Rather then stick with GoDaddy, who I use for this site and many others, I thought I would use this opportunity to explore other hosting providers.
Since the site is run on WordPress, I started at http://wordpress.org/hosting/. After reviewing and comparing the providers on this page, I decided on AN Hosting. For the price ($6.95) per month, it seemed like a good deal. Transferring and setup were flawless. I worked with their technical support on a few trouble tickets to get everything setup quickly and easily. The only bummer was they charged for a full year up front. I did notice that AN Hosting is actually MidPhase Hosting and all billing and trouble tickets were handled in the MidPhase name.
So, while homeless during my move to Phoenix, I was shocked to received the following email:
Subject: We had to suspend your account
From: support@midphase.com
Body:
Hello,
We had to suspend the account with disneyfrontier.com due to high CPU and RAM usage.
Currently the web site is using about 25.41% of RAM.
Our limits are 10% of each resource.Unfortunately we can’t afford to host so large account on a shared server it affects other accounts.
I strongly recommend you to consider upgrade to a dedicated or VPS server or limit your downloads.More information for a VPS or dedicated servers you can find on the
following pages:
http://midphase.com/html_files/hosting_plan_vps.php
http://midphase.com/html_files/hosting_plan_dedicated.phpThank you
This email was sent on May 29th at 9:34AM. I can understand why they need to do this. Shared hosting isn’t for big popular sites. With the recent release of Pirates of the Caribbean 3, the blog was receiving almost twice as much traffic as it normally does. However, I had just installed a few plugins that I thought might be increasing the CPU load. I inactivated the plugins and sent the following reply:
I disabled some wordpress plugins that I think may have been CPU and RAM intensive. Can you please re-check my usage?
The response was:
Dear Josh,
Current CPU usage is 26.96%MEM
Your site is too heavy to be hosted on shared server, sorry.Thank you
And boom, my site was shut off. This was at 11:18 AM. Less then 2 hours from the first email. No time to upgrade. No time to find a different hosting provider. Nothing. Due to their shut off, my traffic obviously went down to zero. I lost all my Google juice. And because I was in the middle of the move, I couldn’t get the site back up until June 4th. That was seven days of downtime.
So, I switched back to GoDaddy (on their $6.95 plan). The Disney blog is a hobby site for me and doesn’t make enough money to cover hosting. Their is no way I can afford to pay for dedicated hosting on it. I understand where AN Hosting is coming from, but they should have given me some time to make the necessary changes.
I am trying to get a refund for the 7 months of service they charged me for but didn’t fulfill. I am also working on transferring the domain name back to GoDaddy.
Hopefully, wordpress.org will remove AN Hosting as a recommended provider. They were awesome during setup, but I feel they didn’t give me any options the first time an issue arose. For many who read this blog and someday hope to get a site on digg.com, think what would happen if you were hosted on AN Hosting. You’d get dugg and then shut off.
Tags: AN Hosting, Shared Hosting, Godaddy
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