Lunarpages!

Tom, Please don't take any of this as my trying to be rude, I am just stating a few facts:



I have been interacting withe website/hosting world since I was 15 years old (am 31 now...). I do know the difference between mysql and apache connections.



Really? How can you make that guarantee? I have personally had this problem on my own sites where too many users came on-board at once and the server stopped delivering the content. Spikes occur when certain events give people a special incentive to visit your site or perhaps your business or organization gets written up in a magazine or newspaper, it is THOSE times when it matters how many concurrent connections your host allows and those also happen to be the same times that your company or business has the MOST potential for rapid growth. In these moments the difference between 50 and 400 concurrent connections makes a HUGE difference. This is important because there are people who don't get enough traffic to justify paying 3-4 times more for a virtual dedicated server, yet they need a shared host that has the versatility to handle occasional spikes in traffic.



I wasn't trying to confuse anyone with scary statistics, though I apologize if that's the effect that my post had. It certainly wasn't my intention, which is exactly why I posted this at the end of my previous post explaining the apache limits.





This is absolutely correct, and I have mentioned all of this info in previous posts in this thread. Though the one exception to this is a site that has streaming audio/video content.



Here is my response:



and here is the page on Hostgators site that explains this limitation:

http://support.hostgator.com/articles/p … out-apache

and here is the info on GoDaddy's web site regarding concurrent connections. Notice they differentiate between stats for MYSQL and for the actual server that your site is being hosted on:

http://help.godaddy.com/article/5089

I stand corrected.

I have to say I am glad you challenged me otherwise I wouldn't have found out that hostgator changed the limitation from 400 to 600, making them by FAR the web host giving you the most traffic for your money.

Hostgator has a good reputation but they do oversell their servers. I have been reading people complain about the new script HG has implemented that will completely shut your dynamic site down if you use too much resources violating their tos. I guess it's better than a suspension, though. What people have to realize is that nothing on a server is unlimited, it's a sales pitch. You are limited in other ways. I had a blog and a CMS on HG for a month. The front end was ok for the most part with very little traffic but the back end was miserably slow. Static sites will be ok.

I think that if I ever go back to a shared environment, I will choose Rochen. They are a little more for a lot less space and bandwidth but people swear by the server speeds and support. And they use suPHP as their PHP handler instead of DSO like HG uses. Much more secure in a shared environment concerning cross account hacks.

There's nothing like server errors when your getting too much traffic...

That's why people have to realize that unlimited offerings are merely a marketing gimmick. Of course disk space and bandwidth are limited and cost hosts money, so something, somewhere, is going to limit their hosting endeavors - but that is always buried in the tos.aup. Fortunately, most people will never have to worry about reaching that conclusion, and that is why the host are able to offer unlimited plans.

VERY well stated. And that was really my motivation behind explaining the server limitations of a shared hosting plan to people; not to try and scare them as you suggested.

If "unlimited" hosting plans were TRULY unlimited than what's to stop eBay or Amazon.com from getting a basic hosting plan from GoDaddy or Dreamhost and parking their site there lol! Obviously there are many other considerations, like the ability to host executable programs, but I am mainly trying to be tongue in cheek with that statement

I actually had my organization and web address mentioned in TIME Magazine a few years ago, about a quarter page was dedicated to me. I don't normally get enough traffic to justify shelling out the dough for a dedicated server, but that particular week (and for a few weeks after) my site was getting CRAZY traffic. The day the article hit newstands my shared server stopped delivering the site to ppl. Whose to say how many people got 404 errors that never bothered to try back later. That's lost exposure and lost revenue, all because of some stupid server limitations that I didn't even know existed. Just to be upfront, that particular crash wasn't caused by a limitation on the number on concurrent connections, but it still illustrates the point that I am trying to make, and it served as my primary motivation for looking into these limitations so I could make sure that what happened never happens again...

That's awesome.

Chad & Tom,

Interesting discussion here, and quite informative, too, I might add. I'd like to ask a question on another topic, though, and I hope my question isn't off topic for this forum. I was wondering if it is best to make one's domain registration info public or private. I've done some research on the web about this and found some articles that claim private registration isn't really private. I also read that the owner of a domain name actually loses ownership when s/he makes the registration private. For example, see the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_privacy
http://news.cnet.com/Private-domains-no … 33663.html

Tom