Not Happy - Now Happy

[GoodBYtes]

It said that a good company knows how to take critisims and look at finding solutions, or help its customer better understand a situation or improving their service.

I hope this is what I'll be getting from this open conversation. Why open? I am intrested and hopping for people suggestions and better understanding networking and the issue at hand. And if anything I did was not the best way to do things, share it with others to help increase the quality of the service provided by you guys and the customers.

 

I have been, still am, and seek to continue to be a supporter of TotalChoice Hosting. I suggest TotalChoice Hosting to all intresting in making a website because of the friendly and speedy service, all by delivering a solid reliable experience and web hosting service. I have been TotalChoice Hosting client for so long I don't even remember. I have 2 web hosting service with you guys to drive 2 web sites. One web site for my personal usage, and the other for sharing images on the web, small private FTP to sending picture between family members which are across the globe, and other usages, for example univeristy projects. Why 2 web host, well I don't want my other website domain to show up everywhere on unrelated content, and I want to keep my web hosting monthly bandwidth apart. And I want to help support TotalChoice Hosting

 

So why I am not happy? What turned my big smile into a big frown?

It all happened today actually. One of the things I do, and hence the "sharing images on the web" part comes into play, I like to help people in PC tech forums. I post screenshot, diagrams, and all sorts of things.

 

Today, I was covering the Nvidia GTC press event:

Here is the forum post: http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/131582-nvidia-gtc-press-event/

At arround 5000 only viewers on the thread, my account got suspended, and got an e-mail from Balakrishnan at TCH

 

 

Your account is under heavy traffic, looks to be under DDOS taking up all the server resources and crashing the apache server. I have suspended the account to keep the server stable. We will continue to monitor the account and unlock it once the traffic dies down.

 

And this is where my smile went down a bit. As suggest by the e-mail at the end I have contacted via AOL/AIM Balakrishnan. Which made me go to through the whole trouble of making an AIM account, to inform him that this is just high traffic and not a DDOS attack, and I was hopping for some suggestions. Maybe offload the images on my 2 web hosts? I didnt' do it now, because I didn't want to take the chance to mathers worse. I haven't and still seek suggestions.

 

And this is where I got mad. How come TotalChoice Hosting can't handle 5000 viewers? And that is ASSUMING these 5000 visited the web site simultaniously, which I highly doubt.

 

Regardless, I am seeking advice in either having this problem solved, trying to understand why it was an issue (is it because there was a lot of images? Are image size the problem? Was it my bandwidth cap that passed?). Any suggestions to help things, like combine images together? Last year, I have done the same thing as I did now, same press event, same style of coverage and it was not a problem.

 

Also, why I can no longer access my web site via FTP? Why was that suspended as well?

 

Thank you for your time and patience.

Edited March 25, 2014 by GoodBYtes

[shoes]

Are you hosting on a shared server? If so I think you got really lucky that last year your site was not suspended. 5000 viewers on a forum that is MySQL driven is a big load for a shared server. These are the risks you take on a shared hosting platform.

 

Perhaps you should think of upgrading to a VPS or Dedicated server because in my view your way over using a cheap shared hosting account.

[TCH-Dick]

I am sorry you had issues today, unfortunately the combination of the total images, total size, and amount of traffic was having a negative affect on the rest of the clients on this server.

 

To put some numbers to from what I can currently see:

The forum thread you linked to has been over 13,000 times today.

That thread has 52 images linked to your site.

Those images total 14MB in size.

 

What all this means is that every time someone loaded that page, it made 52 requests to your site for a total of 14MB of data. Using the number you posted of 5000, that is 260,000 requests for data in a short time, which attempted to send back 70,000 MB or 68 GB of data.

 

This is not a large amount by some measurements, but you have to take into consideration that this is a shared hosting account. Toss that much network traffic at your shared account at one time, along with usage from other users and it will cause issues.

 

At this time I have activated your site and we are monitoring it, since you are still receiving a traffic for those images.

[GoodBYtes]

Ah! Now I understand much better the situation.

Thank you.

 

As mentioned, I have another shared server with you guys which is a different server name than the server used in the forum. Would it be better if I put half the images on the other server? (willing to do this compromise) Or would that make no difference or worse?

 

I'll remove all images by April 5 or 6th to avoid continuous large traffic. I think that would be a good idea on my part.

Edited March 26, 2014 by GoodBYtes

[TCH-Antonyo]

Hi,


Thank you for the prompt responds. We are monitoring our all our servers, if we found any issues (loads) we will take action against the account and will send a notice to the client. If we find any issues from your account we will inform you through the registred email address with the hosting account.

[TCH-Bala]

Just wanted to add that moving the images over to another server is not the ideal solution here. Once again, the problem was with the huge surge that suddenly came in to the server, which is not going to be fully averted when the images are on another server, it may just overload the other server too. The key here is optimization of the content, reducing images, cross links etc. On the brighter side, now you know your site has the potential to generate good hits, so as things grow, I would recommend exploring the possibilities of hosting all your sites on a dedicated server

[Head Guru]

Mr. GoodBytes -

 

I am glad to see things were resolved in a manner that was good. If you looking to upgrade into a VPS or a Dedicated Server, drop me an email and I will dig up a Customer Loyalty Coupon that will save you 20-50% per month depending on what upgrade you choose.

 

Thanks for your business.

[GoodBYtes]

Sorry for the delay, I was busy with exams.

Dedicated servers is something interesting, but definitely something I'll look into once I graduate and have a full time position to be able to afford it (soon).

 

For now I can only afford shared servers.

 

Thank you very much everyone for your time and patience. I shall be more careful when posting images (or links to my web site) in high traffic forums. I think it is the best thing I can do now, especially the image part which is actually the taxing part for your guys.

 

You guys are awesome as always!

Thank you.

 

P.S: Fell free to change the title of the thread to "Not Happy -> Now happy! :)", or something of your liking.

[TCH-Bala]

Thank you for the update

[TCH-Thomas]

Title changed.