ANHost Wasn’t my Dreamhost
April 22nd, 2007 by MarkThose who have been checking my blog over the last few days have probably noticed a lot of down-time. I’m completely to blame.
This is a long, boring post. For those who don’t want to read it, here are the key points:
- ANHost is fast.
- Their tech support didn’t impress me.
- My blog is a fairly complex and custom-made WP theme. Their system couldn’t handle it well.
- Some less-customized blogs run extremely well on ANHost.
- Dream Host is still the best choice for me.
In nearly every way, Dream Host has been great. They give you insane amounts of bandwidth, they allow you to host an unlimited number of domains, they support two versions of PHP, and you even get shell access! For eight bucks a month!
Still, though, I had one minor complaint. My site doesn’t really load as quickly as I want it to. It’s okay, but I’m on a fast connection. Several of my friends in China have told me it loads quickly, but my buddy Nathan, in Michigan, said it’s slow. I tried a few online speed tests, and found that basically any database-generated page on my site was a bit on the slow side.
So, I decided to try ANHost, the one that David uses. His page always loads blindingly fast, and I haven’t ever noticed it down, so trying his host seemed like a good bet.
Unfortunately, I was never even able to get my page working. From the first transaction I had with them, things just went wrong. After paying for a year’s access, I was taken to a page that would automatically call the phone number I had entered. Unfortunately, it put a US area code at the front of my number, despite the fact that I had selected Taiwan on their address entry form. A quick call to their support line dealt with this problem, but then I immediately ran into another small problem. Then came a more serious one- after copying my files and database over to their system, only my Wordpress pages would load, not the blog posts. When I alerted their admins to the problem, they promptly looked at my main page, decided everything was okay and didn’t bother to click on the links to the blog posts I’d said were down. They just emailed back and said everything was “fine”.
Next, I sent direct links to a dozen posts from this year, all of which were returning Internal Server 500 errors. Then they sent this email:
Sorry, but I do not see the folder “2007″ in your account that’s why your links aren’t working. Please advise.
Considering that I had already told them my site was database driven, and that Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform, I think I can safely say that the support at ANHost sucks. I explained that there shouldn’t be a 2007 folder, and then finally got some real help.
According to their admins the shared server I’d been on had had a problem with its PHP register globals settings. Suddenly all my posts were loading, and they were loading extremely quickly! Yay!
But my main page was no longer loading. Frustrated from long and fruitless exchanges with ANHost support, I tried to fix the problem myself via settings in my user account… and I completely messed them up, accidentally causing my site to use 40% of the shared server’s resources. My account was suspended and soon I received another email from ANHost:
The only way that we can get your site back online is if we go with a dedicated solution.
Please visit http://www.midphase.com/, and click “Dedicated server” to review your options.
We realize this is a bit of a jump, but your site has simply outgrown a shared hosting environment.
Any fees paid toward your midPhase account will be credited on a dedicated plan.Thank you.
It was time to give up and go back to Dreamhost.
:
April 25th, 2007 at 6:53 am
mediatemple.net
April 25th, 2007 at 6:57 am
This website does have long load times from where I am in Japan as well. Other blogs and websites in Taiwan load very quickly. Your top page takes quite a bit of time, probably over 15 seconds, but then things load faster. If I click on the most recent English blog entry, it loads in about 5 seconds.
Perhaps it is my ISP though? A lot of websites in China (especially ChinesePod) load at the pace of a snail. Then again a lot of blogs I read about China open very quickly.
April 25th, 2007 at 7:25 am
Well, I think there are a number of issues at work. One is that Wordpress already has multiple levels of abstraction that slow it down, another is that I’ve done a lot of customizations (and I’m not a PHP programmer). Additionally, I’ve installed a lot of plugins, and I’m loading a lot of scripts. Then, to top it off, the site’s been getting pounded by Googlebot. According to the logs, it has hit the site more than a 1000 in a day. I’m talking with them about it, and hopefully that will be fixed soon. What I really need to do, though is re-work my theme and get rid of all the cruft.
Dreamhost isn’t the fastest host for DB generated content, but I don’t think it’s exceptionally slow, either. Sinosplice runs on Dreamhost, it’s got a lot more traffic than Toshuo, and it seems to load pretty quickly.
April 25th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
Darin, update your link!
April 25th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Everything seems to be working fine for me bro.
http://www.imbermedia.net/blog/en/
I remember you telling me my blog has been down before, but I was never able to recreate the errors. Perhaps your problem with hosting lies on your client end, and not the hosting services :/
April 25th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Ah, I need to update your link. I was clicking through the blogroll. Your blog used to be at http://www.imbermedia.net/blog/
April 25th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
I haven’t had any problems with AN Hosting although they are often quite slow to respond to e-mails.
I do notice that your blog takes longer to load than most other WordPress blogs.
April 26th, 2007 at 7:23 am
Yea; when I was trying to do everything in both Japanese and English, I would send ppl to that address and then link to the /en folder for English and /jp for Japanese, but now I just do all my Japanese language blogging inside mixi (kinda like a myspace, but doesn’t suck). I should put a forwarding thing in there.
April 26th, 2007 at 10:27 am
David, I think that if I’d just gotten everything working, then it would have been fine. After being told that I had to pay huge sums of money for a dedicated server or else remain suspended, I didn’t have much choice but to cancel.
I think ANHost is a bit faster than Dreamhost, but that 99% of my problem is due to my poorly coded theme and being pounded by Google. Do any of you who have found this site slow have problems with Sinosplice, or any other sites on Dreamhost?
April 26th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Yes, it is your theme. I can always see your diet blog very quickly. Maybe you could try that diet theme on this page.
April 26th, 2007 at 11:30 am
Sinosplice loads very quickly on my end. Another DreamHost blog I read in North America also loads quickly.
I will say that I have noticed the difference in your blog when you moved the english blog from the top page to the index page that you have now.
April 26th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Bryan, I think you’re right. Thanks. I just tried setting my blog back to displaying recent posts from the root URL. It sped up a ton. The sad thing is that I’m not using my own hack to make this work anymore! I’m using the standard WP 2.1 static front page feature!
April 26th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
I turned off the WP feature and reverted back to my own code. According to my metrics, the page load times are now 40% of what they were.
April 29th, 2007 at 12:37 am
The first thing I would suggest is installing WP-CACHE2. The biggest problem with Dreamhost is that they use a different server for DB, resulting in very long queries, so that SQL expensive platforms and plugins will cause a very long load. This plugin will use file-caching instead, so that your home page would load alot faster.
Yet, checking your site’s performance with tools like http://alertra.com/spotcheck.php is seems things aren’t that bad.
Like any other cheap shared accounts, Ahhosting is limited in their ability to give support for complicated situations and they have a tendency to result to account suspension extremely fast if you’re doing something wrong. But, the positive thing about Anhosting is that they have live online support and a backup 24×7 phone support, which Dreamhost doesn’t provide. I can’t imagine having to wait for an email response from the tech team for a whole day if the site is down.
BTW - Mediatemple is a great option, if you can spare the 20US$ (16US$ after coupons) a month.
Good luck.
April 29th, 2007 at 3:52 am
Thanks for the info. I’ll have to try WP-CACHE2. I think that if everything had gotten set up properly on ANHost, it would have been fine. It’s possible that I just had a particularly bad experience with tech support. Do you use Mediatemple, Fili?
April 29th, 2007 at 6:18 am
I setup Mediatemple for sites I built for others (Ruby and burstable traffic). I haven’t had much contact with their support since I don’t manage those sites, but I heard very positive feedback and the features+setup are one of the best in the business.
I’m currently struggling with migrating to the VPS/VDS world. Like you’ve heard from Forumosa, things get a whole lot more complicated for high-traffic sites and the costs/value are on a whole different scale. Mediatemple could have solved some of the issues I’m facing for the very-short run, but I don’t feel like going through all this again in 3-6 months. We’ll see how that works out.
April 29th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
fiLi:
I was just going to say that MediaTemple is only 9.99 a month, but I went to the page to send a link and now it says 20/month. When did that happen? I see they increased storage and bandwidth (again), but I’m still only paying 9.99 a month and I’m on ‘the grid’. I only get 5gb storage and 500gb transfer compared to the 100gb storage and 1tb transfer you now get.
As for their service and such, definitely great. And they apparently have Chinese speaking techs available too!
May 6th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
hey there..
I am a chinese from Taiwan, now I am living in the US. I was searching review about dreamhost and anhosting and found this blog.
I was trying to decide where to host my heavily load MySQL driven web sites. By reading your blog, I think I have to choose between dreamhost and ahnosting.
I came from HostingZoom for my online store. HostingZooming is killing my business. It sucks.
What I need is be able to make sure the site is really 99.9% up time.
What exactly Mediatemple do? Are they really chinese company?
Thanks!
May 6th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Media Temple is not a Chinese company, they’re based out of California, but they advertise they have Chinese speaking staff available to help those who need it. It’s more expensive then everyone else, but I’m very happy with it regardless.
May 17th, 2007 at 7:59 am
I have finally switch my web sites to ANHosting. I don’t really care about how big the disk space is. My web site requires more DB connections, which I can get 50 connections at ANHosting.com. I also have one of my client hosted on MediaTemple.net’s grid server. It’s running pretty good. Someone people said that the MySQL pool is perform not so well. It’s slow and unstable, but those post was posted in April.
My impression with MediaTemple.net is very good. My new hosting ANHosting.com is also great. I totally recommend everyone to host there.
I wrote up a post about ANHosting.com here.
http://www.terencechang.com/2007/05/16/terence-chang-is-now-hosted-on-anhostingcom/
http://www.terencechang.com/2007/05/16/anhosting-vs-bluehost/
Thank you all for the userful information. I am happy with ANhosting.com