Is anyone else experiencing consistently high server loads and slow responding servers (virtual and bulk reseller accounts)?

Loads are consistently around 10 and often reach 25. I've been told by their support staff, this is normal and the server can handle the load fine since it has dual processors and 4 GB of RAM?

Please don't go on and on about their great reputation, I would like current experiences from actual clients.

Thinking of moving away from them...

Originally posted by Heidi1972
Loads are consistently around 10 and often reach 25. I've been told by their support staff, this is normal and the server can handle the load fine since it has dual processors and 4 GB of RAM?


Well, is it slow because of server load ? or is the network connection from you to them slow?

If it's the network, then there's not that much they can do (if it's outside their part of the route).

If it's because of server load...

Many moons ago I used to have a shared hosting account with Ventures Online and from what I can remember the server load was constantly up around the 3.0 + mark.

Ventures Online support is fantastic. However, their server loads leave a lot to be desired. I was on the ‘Frogger’ server, if I can remember correctly.

Originally posted by Rochen
Ventures Online support is fantastic. However, their server loads leave a lot to be desired. I was on the ‘Frogger’ server, if I can remember correctly.

Support might have been "fantastic" in the past but today it's at best average. Response times average 30 minutes to 1 hour. They also suggest a $95 per hour support fee for some issues most hosts would offer at no charge. There was a time when tickets were answered within minutes and you were treated as a customer not a number. I've decided to leave ASAP.

Originally posted by Heidi1972
Response times average 30 minutes to 1 hour.

Sounds excellent to me. :confused:

Originally posted by developer
Sounds excellent to me. :confused:

As I said, the response times were at one time within minutes and now it takes up to an hour. Not a bad response time at all and that's hardly my biggest complaint, it's just an indication of things slowly going downhill in my opinion and based on my experiences.

I see Heidi1972, thank you for the explaining.

Update: Just saw a load of 52.14 on the server I'm hosted on.

Oh well.. moving soon but not soon enough. :(

Originally posted by Heidi1972
Response times average 30 minutes to 1 hour.

Edit; noticed later post, although an hour average is nothing to be sniffed at

let me repeat the question, is the server slow/sluggish because of the load? not meaning to be rude, heidi, but you have no understanding of what 'load' is - it is not server load per se, it is the number of processes in wait state that are sitting in the scheduling queue. for all you know, 99% of them could get woken up, check one value and go back to sleep having hardly used any cpu time. what you *should* be looking at is the idle cpu time percentages - if those are in the 60-90% range, you are fine.

paul

Originally posted by rusko
let me repeat the question, is the server slow/sluggish because of the load? not meaning to be rude, heidi, but you have no understanding of what 'load' is - it is not server load per se, it is the number of processes in wait state that are sitting in the scheduling queue. for all you know, 99% of them could get woken up, check one value and go back to sleep having hardly used any cpu time. what you *should* be looking at is the idle cpu time percentages - if those are in the 60-90% range, you are fine.

paul

The problem is server load or too much resource usage. It's not caused by my connection since I've done a spotcheck with Alertra everytime the server was slow to respond on my end and Alertra reports the server down from all locations during the spotcheck.

As far as not completely understanding server load, it's possible but still doesn't change the fact I can't access my site, email, or control panel from multiple locations. I started a large advertising campaign and my site has been unreachable too often, I'm losing money and customers from these issues regardless of the cause so I'm making the choice to move.

:topic: Are you the same Paul that works or worked for Ventures Online?

Looking at your situation, if you're noticing a performance problem with the high server loads (and you are if I am reading this thread correctly) it's definitely time for you to move. Server loads to spike from time to time, but if you're getting a constant high load, then yes move on to somewhere else.

heidi,

if the service appears down to you, your customers and your visitors, that should be all you care about - time to move. i just needed to inject a bit of sanity into how 'load' is interpreted - it is quite tiring to explain that a dual xeon box with a load of 3 and cpu idle % of around 90% is *underloaded* to customers that are used to hosts with single cpu rackhack boxes.

no, i have never worked for ventures online. come to think of it, i have never worked for anyone but myself. was the ventures online paul a nice guy?

paul

Originally posted by rusko
no, i have never worked for ventures online. come to think of it, i have never worked for anyone but myself. was the ventures online paul a nice guy?


Yea, guess so but I really didn't know him.

Do you have ssh access?

Try toping "top" and see what it comes back with (IE copy it here). VO is known to host some rather large forums.

I am a Ventures Online customer. I have used two boxes. The first box was slightly better than the second box. I've seen the "load" hit 125 and yes it was crawling. I understand your concern. I had a $1000 (That’s a lot of money to me) campaign running and the server hit some issues during the middle of it.

Any time I have seen a consistent high spike, I open a ticket, copy the last 3 or 4 uptime's and ask them to look into it. If it is impacting me and my customers, I change it to a priority 1. They typically answer it in 15 minutes or less.

I always ask for an explanation and they usually can tell me what is happening. In most cases, the problem is either a spam attack or a user abusing resources. They promptly take care of it.

I understand that I am on a shared resource server and there will be issues beyond my control. I either accept that or I purchase a Virtual/Dedicated private server.

In VO's defense, I started doing a cost analysis on their bulk reseller plan's. I don't mind having bulk reseller accounts, but their highest Bulk account capped out too quickly on diskspace and the next option was a VPS. I found switching from a Bulk reseller to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) actually caused my costs per customer to go up. I sent them a ticket explaining the dilemma and asked them to forward it up the chain. With in 2 weeks, they announced new bulk reseller accounts with much larger diskspace/bandwidth at the same rates as before. That is the most incredible act of customer service I have ever seen. I actually lowered my cost per customer by 40% because of this.

Because of this I have decided to continue to use VO.