Switching loyalties - A new hosting company for better or for worse!

What happened

As I explained during the early days of this site, (see this) I do this as a hobby, for my own amusement. So it goes without saying that I don't want to spend big bucks on web hosting or any other thing related to this hobby of mine. So, when I decided that I should do this on a paid hosting environment as opposed to piggy-backing on a university web-server as I did during late-nineties. Naturally, I went for the cheapest on the market that satisfy my requirements:

1. I needed a Template:Wikip:Linux or other Template:Wikip:UNIX flavor operating system.
2. Support for a few Template:Wikip:MySQL databases and Template:Wikip:PHP.

That's what I got for some US$4 per month from godaddy.com. There is no question that this is a bargain! 5GB of space, 250GB monthly bandwidth, 10 mySQL databases, what else can a fellow ask for?

My site is based on Mediawiki (description) and godaddy did not provide a Mediawiki installation. This was in fact irrelevant for me. Anyway, my Mediawiki installation was fairly non-standard, so even if they did have direct support, still that may not have worked for me. What I did was, within my 5GB space, I installed my version of Mediawiki and got the game going.

godadaddys cheapo shared-hosting do not [as of 23:17, 3 September 2006 (JST)] provide shell access for the users to login and install software. But, I circumvented it. I could install almost anything I needed, wrote a bit longish .htaccess file and my web site was up and running.

Initially, things were slow, but not painfully so. Remembering that I pay only 4 bucks a month, I did not complain. Then after about a month of detachment, I came back to see that my site was slooow like molasses! A page took more than 15 - 20 seconds to load. Even for 4 bucks it was not acceptable.

Godaddy support

First thing I phoned godaddy support people. I had done this only once before, when I really messed up my DNS records and they were prompt in helping me. This time, it was a bit different. First they suggested perhaps my ISP has problems. Of course this was the first thing that I checked and all other sites were working fine. When I told them that, they asked me to hold on. After about 15 minutes, they came back on line and told me:

1. They notice that I am running 'mediawiki like somthing'. It may be slow, so I may optimize my code.
2. I may pay 100 bucks a month and get a dedicated server.

I had already verified (1). In fact at the bottom of each page there is a little html comment tag saying how much time it took to render a page. It was consistently showing one or two seconds most. So, (1) was not the reason. And I do not have means or necessity to go for (2), when all I want is to have a hobby.

Further, when I checked the behavior of my site under moderate stress (you can do this by a web site load testing tool like wikip:JMeter) I was dismayed to find that it returns "Server Busy" errors.

I decided its time to switch hosts.

My Reasons

My reasons