I have a small website that runs a UBB bulletin board.

This is my current account info

Disk Space Usage: 239.52 MB out of 400.00 MB available
Disk File Usage: 19366 Files out of 25000 Files available
Traffic/Bandwidth: 7.21 GB out of 20.00 GB available/month

I was told that my UBB was causing a resource issue and it had to be disabled. This is weird considering that I am paying $90/month.

UBB can really suck the life out of a CPU and hog a ton of Ram. It's very poorly written and optimized script, especially for shared servers.

If you were paying 90 a month, you might as well go and get United Colo Box, and share it with someone who knows how to admin a server if you don't.

wow, for $90/month most places would allow you a fair amount of resource allocation.

At only 7 gigs of bandwidth per month the amount of CPU usage of UBB should easily be within range of a $90.00 a month price tag.

Perhaps the server is too crowded?

Shocking. :eek2:

you should migrate from ubb to vbulletin or phpbb

both have good import scripts

Price has nothing to do with anything. In the hosts defense, unless they specifically advertised that you were placed on a server because you were using a resource intensive script, they had the right ot ask you to move on.

As a client, check to see if they had a list of banned scripts. If they didn't, then ask them for a refund of the month or at least some "free" time until you move to another host. Alternatively, switch to a set of scripts that don't eat the cpu so much.

WOW,

There uptime must be very good but also right?
They are not a small host exactly from what i have heard.

Remeber you pay for quality and if you are effecting other 90$ Month accounts you should be moved from that server.

Were is your 90$ Deal i cant see it on the website?

Regards
Phillip

Price has nothing to do with anything. In the hosts defense, unless they specifically advertised that you were placed on a server because you were using a resource intensive script, they had the right ot ask you to move on. I would respectfully disagree with this statement. If his $90.00 is say 15% of the income from the server then I would say he is entitled to 15% of the server resources. Since resource usage is never spelled out in exact % allocation amounts(that I have ever seen), the amount of money paid for the account should absolutely have a bearing on a decision of this type.

I would further point out that at 7 gigs of traffic a month, even for UBB, there couldnt possibly be that much resource usage unless the server is maxed out and every bit counts. After all it's not Ikonboard or Yabb.

In the Host's defense I would say there might be more to this then we know. If Nomad was 100% accurate then I think it was a very poor and unsubstantiated action by the host to terminate the account.

The issue is with UBB for sure. It's got a bit of a reputation for being resource hungry. The fact you still have transfer and webspace available isn't related to the load the script will put on the server.

If you've enjoyed their service up to now you might look at the aforementioned PHP alternatives that provide import scripts. $90 a month seems a little steep to me, but if the support is there as well then it's probably money well spent.

Greg Moore

Bandwidth usage may say very little about resource usage, however. 7.21 GB is not a lot, but if the server wasn't fine tuned for UBB, things could easily go haywire. I was on a virtual host for a UBB (now retired) that transferred around 20 gigs/month without problems. From what I know the host fined tuned a lot of things just to appropriately handle UBB.

I've since migrated to vBulletin. Cheaper, faster, more efficient, easier mantainance.

For a little more than $90 a month, you could easily get yourself a dedicated server and host your site without fear of overusing the server resources.

Scripts tend to be quite resource hungry especially when they can called upon very often compared to providing static html pages.

There is no correlations between Bandwidth and CPU Utilization. It could be doing tons of processing over a couple of seconds but just send out a small file as a result of the processing.

The trouble with shared hosting is that you are not the only one using the server resources and it seems that web hosts never published the number of sites they have on that machine and which uses more resources than the others. I guess that is part of protecting the clients' interest which would be fair. But on the other hand, you do not know how stretched that machine is.

For $90/mth you could get a low end server and do quite well with it. If not, there are other virtual dedicated server solution for that price or less.

Originally posted by Choppy

Were is your 90$ Deal i cant see it on the website?


Well, it could have been a custom deal since I do not see any plan offering 400mb space + 20gb bandwidth. The highest plan seems to be one offering 300mb + 15gb bandwidth for $26.95 .

Maybe it's just me, but until $90 a month clients start growing on trees I think I would have tried to work this out with Nomad.

Help him change the UBB script to something more efficient, move him to another server, or any number of other possible solutions.

I certainly would not have told him to pack his bags.

Nomad never mentioned whether those stats were from the start of this month or the specific time period. One would assume since January 01.

He also did not mention how busy his forums are. Perhaps they had a spike in activity because of an event of some sort and had lots of concurrent users.

Regardless, I would suggest switching to Vbulletin and finding another host. Then put a few dollars back in your pocket. You can get semi-dedicated plans in many cases for around $60 or so depending on the host and there should be no further problems though one would think a decent virtual account would still be fine.

Originally posted by Watcher_TVI
I would respectfully disagree with this statement. If his $90.00 is say 15% of the income from the server then I would say he is entitled to 15% of the server resources. Since resource usage is never spelled out in exact % allocation amounts(that I have ever seen), the amount of money paid for the account should absolutely have a bearing on a decision of this type.

I would further point out that at 7 gigs of traffic a month, even for UBB, there couldnt possibly be that much resource usage unless the server is maxed out and every bit counts. After all it's not Ikonboard or Yabb.

In the Host's defense I would say there might be more to this then we know. If Nomad was 100% accurate then I think it was a very poor and unsubstantiated action by the host to terminate the account.


Again price has nothing to do with anything. unless the host specifically advertised that a certain amount of cpu usage is included in the $90/month, then you have no argument. and again not saying the host was right, just stating the facts from an abritrary point of view.

hypothetical situation:
Dedicated server costs me $400/month. I sell 10 resellers package each at $50/month. Does this mean that each reseller gets 1/8 of the resources? Can't happen...

So for all your clients, a client paying say $50 a month gets the same amount of resources as someone paying $5 a month.

That is really how you allocate resources to your customers?
I wouldn't think of treating my clients that way so I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.

So for all your clients, a client paying say $50 a month gets the same amount of resources as someone paying $5 a month.

Unless it is advertised that each client gets a certain % of the CPU resources, yes. And if i dont advertise that i'm limiting the cpu resources, then they arne't getting the same amount, they just aren't guaranteed a portion of it.

If you take a look at many of the major players here, they don't guarantee a minimum level of CPU resources per account.



That is really how you allocate resources to your customers?


I don't have any customers - not a host ;)

And if i dont advertise that i'm limiting the cpu resources, then they arne't getting the same amount, they just aren't guaranteed a portion of it They aren't getting the same amount of resources? So the size/cost of the account DOES matter you just won't tell your clients that so you can use it against them if you need to. I understand now....I don't have any customers - not a host You never will if you tell your larger accounts they can expect the same amount of resources as your smallest accounts....:emlaugh:

They aren't getting the same amount of resources?

No you misunderstood and i wasn't clear enough. I'm not specifying that they are guaranteed or limited to certain amounts. They get what they use. If they are using too much then I would do what I could to lower the cpu usage on the server, which may include moving an account using a lot of cpu power off the server (but not necessarily out of the company)


again, I'm not a host....don't see why you were laughing at me ;)

But as a good host should, if an acocunt was using a good percentage of the servers cpu resources, then I would highly suggest to them to move off to another server (again, not necessarily out of the company) so that it benefits both the client and the host.

:eek:

You never will if you tell your larger accounts they can expect the same amount of resources as your smallest accounts....


Actually Akash ran a sucessful hosting company, however it's changed ownership. I don't ever recall hearing something bad about it before.


And, I agree, no certain customer should get more resources than another unless they that is how the plans are laid out, but in that case they would be offering virtual dedicated accounts, and not shared account.

Let's break it down, if you have 400 megs of disc space you are going to be able to run more scripts and subsequently use more resources then if you had 50 megs of disc storage.

Do you agree?

Originally posted by inogenius



Actually Akash ran a sucessful hosting company, however it's changed ownership. I don't ever recall hearing something bad about it before.


Thanks for the compliments. And to this day, AFAIK there were no major issues with said company. New owner is also a very well known member of the hosting community.

And, I agree, no certain customer should get more resources than another unless they that is how the plans are laid out, but in that case they would be offering virtual dedicated accounts, and not shared account.

That's what I've been trying to say. Unless it is specifically advertised to the customer, the host has no obligation to reserve cpu resources for the customers. If a customer asked specifically for a certain % of resources, i wouldn't deny them hosting.

In this specific thread (getting back to it) the client didn't mention if their plan inlcude a percent of the resources or not - so i assumed they didn't. whichis why i said price has nothing to do with anything

I was laughing at the idea that money doesnt matter...:)

It has nothing to do with you or your experiences. I just don't have it in me to tell a client that if they pay $90 per month that they can only use the same amount of resources that a client paying $5 a month uses.

More money= larger account= more scripts= more resources.

Money certainly is a factor....

A question for the guru's, since PHP boards are more efficient than CGI boards. Would XMB be a good solution to use, or would you rather use PHPBB?

If anything at all i would use vbulletin, but it costs money to use it.

What would you guys recommend for free php boards that won't suck up server resources?

XMB is outdated (old). phpBB, Invisionboard, or vb would be my 3 picks

Originally posted by maxideus
A question for the guru's, since PHP boards are more efficient than CGI boards. Would XMB be a good solution to use, or would you rather use PHPBB?

If anything at all i would use vbulletin, but it costs money to use it.

What would you guys recommend for free php boards that won't suck up server resources?

Heavily used forums are going to use a healthy bit of resources whether they're CGI or PHP. Php is going to be more efficient, however, and a better choice for a forum.

I've never been a fan of XMB personally. PHPBB is okay. Invisionboard is my personal favorite of the free boards and I can see it rivaling Vbulletin very soon as far as features are concerned. http://www.invisionboard.com

:)