A friend of mine just received this e-mail from Site5.com:

***
Dear Valued Site5 Customer,

It has been brought to our attention that your website - cyber-funk.net -
has been consistently using a large amount of system resources. As a
result, you will need to find a new hosting provider for this site.

As stated in our service agreement, you will receive ten (10) days in which
to locate a new host and transfer your site. If you have pre-paid for a
hosting contract, you will be issued a pro-rated refund as soon as the
aforementioned ten day period is up.

We would like to thank you for your patronage, and wish you the best of luck
in your online endeavors. If your site is currently suspended, it will be
unsuspended shortly so that you can download your files and begin the
transfer process.

Best Regards,
Site5 Billing Department
billing@site5.com
****

I've never heard of anything like this. Usually a host would offer some kind of an alternative or suggest ways to cut down on the usage, but they're just kicking him off. I'm planning to release a large website myself and this is really stunning. I thought I finally found a great host since site5 has been reliable, but now I'm doubting that.

I agree that those are strict measures, but some hosts have no other options except what they did. I'm sure you'll hear an explanation from Matt ... he is a good guy, and he hangs around here. But I have even worse stories! When I used to resell for CommuniTech a year ago, one of my sites was suspended for "not having web pages and just files." It was a long story, but we were in the right. Then they wouldn't allow us to access the files to move them to a different server! After about a half hour to an hour of pleading with various people at CommuniTech, they finally gave me some time to tar it all up and FTP it to another server. That ruined my relationship with them.

Originally posted by bad
A friend of mine just received this e-mail from Site5.com:

***
Dear Valued Site5 Customer,

It has been brought to our attention that your website - cyber-funk.net -
has been consistently using a large amount of system resources. As a
result, you will need to find a new hosting provider for this site.

As stated in our service agreement, you will receive ten (10) days in which
to locate a new host and transfer your site. If you have pre-paid for a
hosting contract, you will be issued a pro-rated refund as soon as the
aforementioned ten day period is up.

We would like to thank you for your patronage, and wish you the best of luck
in your online endeavors. If your site is currently suspended, it will be
unsuspended shortly so that you can download your files and begin the
transfer process.

Best Regards,
Site5 Billing Department
billing@site5.com
****

I've never heard of anything like this. Usually a host would offer some kind of an alternative or suggest ways to cut down on the usage, but they're just kicking him off. I'm planning to release a large website myself and this is really stunning. I thought I finally found a great host since site5 has been reliable, but now I'm doubting that.

This is perfectly reasonable to happen. An entire web server with shared client's simply can't have their own site's performance compromised, or site5 would be expected to give you your own server, for the cost of the one account that deems a dedicated server as necessary. However, there are measures that can and can not be implemented to safely limit the resources that a client's site consumes to allow them to be hosted still, and not affect other user's. However, this depends on what is causing the resources to be consumed to that point and it also would very likely just result in 1/3rd of the scripts or pages on the site displaying errors due to resource restrictions that would have to be set.

You can see why it's reasonable to not be able to host the person, as well as the fact that it probably would result in that person's site suffering from errors due to resource limitations anyway, so a move is the best option anyway in that person's case. Host's sometimes run into this issue and it's not fun to have to deal with for anyone. They lose your business and you have to find another server.

However, I can only suggest two things; See if the web host is willing to implement a means to limit that account's resources and make sure that your site's programs are coded to be more efficient and go further to inquire about the use of tools that will improve performance of scripts to reduce the load on the server's resources -- such as mod_perl, FastCGI, etc. However, if these things are not currently an option, even though they can be quickly implemented on the server side, it doesn't help unless you are able to code the programs to use these tools to improve the performance and lessen the load in a small amount of time -- which until then, could pose a risk to the quality of the other user's on the same server while this is being done, if you have the knowledge and time frame. Again, you can see why this isn't something uncommon, just unfortunate.

If other's of you haven't, take a look at the website, cyber-funk.net.

You'll see he has multiple MP3 Files, all of which are his. He also has around 6+ music video's. Each is atleast 30MB and go upwards to 60MB. He get's around (what I remember) 2,000 hits a day.

But bad, keep in mind you can use all that bandwidth, but how long as he been with Site5? If you using that up in half a month, or a large portion, your asking for it. Keep in mind it's not bandwidth but the resources that go into dealing with serving the site, it's files - but not forgetting it's multiple CGI scripts (which are used frequently), and the large video's. That adds upto bandwidth and server resources. The rules are similiar for host's.

I have been with Site5, and am comtemplating to use them again. Between them and Ventures Online (www.venturesonline.com), they really aren't in too good of shape. One thing I can vouch for is Matt, an administrator and programmer. He is very knowledgeable when it come's to servers and I mean hardcore server maintenance and programming. I also like the reseller features, none of which I'll use right now - so I don't think I'll be going with them, but they are still possible.

Yeah, I see what you all are saying. I was basicly taken aback by such a sudden forceful termination of his account. I've had overusage problems with other hosts before but all of them offered an alternative that didn't involve getting kicked off.

Also, cyber-funk.net media files are all hosted on another server, not site5, so that does not contribute to the resources. His anti-leech script probably does, however. I'm planning to release a big script-driven site myself, and after this, I am pretty much sure I will suffer the same fate.

Ok, my mistake then. I didn't know, but assumed that they could be.

Keep in mind, his anti-leech script, along with his other's do tend to add to it.

Do you keep in mind of the graphic's or "funny pictures" he has? Whenever people view them, they look at them all (or would again think so). If not, the ratio r it can be changed, but high enough so it still transfers good amount of bandwidth.

He could have used his 27GB of bandwidth, if he hadn't done so in a short amount of time.

I'm not totally sure how it's all being used, but I'd like to help, and I offered to do so.

As a side note; what plan did you sign up with at Site5? This way I have a small knowledge of your situtation.

Adam. WebExec plan. So is mizi's cyber-funk.

he sure has a nice message about Site5 on his front page.. Oh and don't dare right click on his front page...(note to self.. this right click thing may be a good idea)

My site down and I'm bored!!

[Edited by Mbarb on 03-28-2001 at 11:35 AM]

Originally posted by Mbarb
...Oh and don't dare right click...

If you want to study the source then Code Lifter shows it just fine, event the frame loading page.

(What do you call that base page anyway, the one that sets up the frames?)

Gary

And thanks, in advance, for akashik's upcoming reply.

[Edited by projo on 03-28-2001 at 02:03 PM]

I was gona copy his beautiful message about site5...I could also just disable JavaScript if I really wanted to be able to right click.. I guess this is getting a bit off topic now.

(What do you call that base page anyway, the one that sets up the frames?)

Gary


Gary,

You mean the frameset? :)

Greg Moore

Matt & Vince at site5 are very resonable and level headed. Rest assured, that they wouldn't take action like this unless it was warranted. Sometimes action like this does have to be taken. Imagine the other 300 people on the server they have to anwser to as to why the server is going slow. Best to lose 1 client over 300. They also did it in a very tastful manner.

Best of luck to everybody!

Originally posted by ckizer
Matt & Vince at site5 are very resonable and level headed. Rest assured, that they wouldn't take action like this unless it was warranted. Sometimes action like this does have to be taken. Imagine the other 300 people on the server they have to anwser to as to why the server is going slow. Best to lose 1 client over 300. They also did it in a very tastful manner. This thread hasn't been posted to in a while but I figured I'd write because I'm still looking at plans.... While the refund and time to move is appreciated, from going through the hell of trying to find another host and also being on the contractual side of this business I will have to say that this action is not right. My understanding is that site5 locks you into 90 day recurring agreements so they would have to give you 90 days notice unless there is some fine print I haven't seen. Additionally, it's rather disturbing when the rules can just change at will and are arbitrary, and one day, after committing time effort and cash to your site, you are hit with the "something you've done that is unidentified has already caused a problem... please look elsewhere."

I've read through a number of posts and it seems that the site5 people are reasonable, but this should be explained. I'm not happy with the answers you people gave -- in any deal there have to be clear expectations from both parties involved. I need to know what I need to expect before I invest in a company. I've been with OLM for 4 years until I have decided to leave for various reasons, not the least of which are lagging options and terrible inconsistent sales department which needs to handle everything....

slinky,

As stated, these accounts were causing service to be degraded for a large number of users on our servers (250+ per server). When you have one user using 95% of the resources, and the other's fighting for the remaining 5%, you have to do something in a timely manner. Waiting 3 months or 12 months for their contract to expire is simply not acceptable to our other users. Imagine us trying to say to our customers "We know why your site has been sluggish lately; one of our customers is using a ton of resources on that server. Don't worry though, their contract expires in 6 more months and we've decided not to let them renew..." As you can imagine, that wouldn't fly well, and is hardly responsible of us. ;)

As most companies do, we have a clause in our service agreement that allows us to terminate service upon 10 days notice to the customer. We don't just up and decide that they're causing problems and tell them they have to go.

Obviously we didn't go into business to sign people up and kick them off our servers, but unfortunately there are some cases where something has to be done, and done quickly. We are in the process of developing a "semi-dedicated" platform which will allow customers whose site is too large for a shared environment, but not quite ready for dedicated servers to remain with Site5.

The bottom line is that we can't allow one or two sites to disrupt service for 250 others - regardless of the fact that we would like to keep those resource intensive sites as customers also. If you were one of the 250 customers whose service was suffering because there were a couple sites on the server using up all the available resources, you would certainly appreciate actions like this. We don't practice this often (a total of about 10 times in the company's hostiry), but there are times when it is absolutely necessary to protect the quality of service to the majority of our customers.

If that explanation is not satisfactory, then I don't know what else to tell you. This is actually a common practice among hosting companies (ones who care about their service anyway), and despite the fact that we hate doing it, needs to be done every once in a while.

Hope that clears things up for you.

Best Regards,
Matt Lightner
mlightner@site5.com

Originally posted by Site5-Matt
As stated, these accounts were causing service to be degraded for a large number of users on our servers (250+ per server). When you have one user using 95% of the resources, and the other's fighting for the remaining 5%, you have to do something in a timely manner. Waiting 3 months or 12 months for their contract to expire is simply not acceptable to our other users.....
As most companies do, we have a clause in our service agreement that allows us to terminate service upon 10 days notice to the customer. We don't just up and decide that they're causing problems and tell them they have to go. I expected this response and that you would have this ability to terminate in your service contract. Your answer was not illogical or unreasonable. But my question was more about clarification of policies. It was tough to find your terms of service although you do have something called "legal" which states:

"If the Site5 system administration team determines that a customer's account is utilizing an unacceptable amount of system resources, Site5 may temporarily or permanently deactivate the account in question. Customer may or may not receive a refund depending on the individual case."

What does this mean and what constitutes "unacceptable?" I have no idea what you think is "unacceptable" and that number can be 15% of the resources if you have 20 people sharing one server. One would think that while you have the right to terminate and that your reasons are not unjustifiable, a user should know what to expect and also receive prior notice regarding "unacceptable" usage.

Personally, I think the industry as a whole should be telling consumers what to expect. This is similar to APR percentages on loans or the old ISP problems -- what are the ratios of account users to servers? What benchmarks will be used in determining the limits of one's account? I don't think this is unreasonable either.

Originally posted by slinky
What does this mean and what constitutes "unacceptable?" I have no idea what you think is "unacceptable" and that number can be 15% of the resources if you have 20 people sharing one server. One would think that while you have the right to terminate and that your reasons are not unjustifiable, a user should know what to expect and also receive prior notice regarding "unacceptable" usage.

Personally, I think the industry as a whole should be telling consumers what to expect. This is similar to APR percentages on loans or the old ISP problems -- what are the ratios of account users to servers? What benchmarks will be used in determining the limits of one's account? I don't think this is unreasonable either.
I can see your concern here, however it's not that easy. We don't simply run a program called "userresourcepercentage" and it will give us a percentage back that we can take to the customer say "Your site was using 73.5% of the available resources on the Infinity server."

In fact, it is much more complicated, and involves numerous factors such as number of Apache processes spawned, resource intensity of CGI programs on the site, number and frequency of MySQL connections, size and traffic of the website itself. Then you get into the whole mess of "how much of the system's resources does an apache process take as compared to an open, active mysql connection. What about an inactive connection? What about script A, script B and script C that this user has running? What about a traffic surge to the site?" etc, etc..

There are so many variables involved that it really does depend on the individual case. Setting hard limits on what constitutes as an unacceptable amount of resources used by a site would be irresponsible on our part, as it would hinder the ability of our system administrators to make knowledgeable decisions in cases such as this.

You should also keep in mind that not all of our servers are identical, and 50% of the available resources on a server with dual 600MHz processors and 768 MB RAM is significantly less than 50% of the available resources on a server with dual GHz processors and 2 GB of RAM.

Due to the fact that there are too many factors to consider when calculating the "total resource usage" for any given account, it is simply left up to our system administrators to decide - as that's what they get paid for. To tell you the truth, if you don't trust a company enough to make sound judgements regarding the management and administration of their servers, then you probably shouldn't have your site hosted there anyway. :erm:

At any rate, I wish you the best of luck on your host hunt. If you do happen find a host that lists an exact system resource percentage in their TOS, let me know who they are; I want to ask them exactly how they calculate it! ;)

Best Regards,
Matt Lightner
mlightner@site5.com

Originally posted by Site5-Matt
You should also keep in mind that not all of our servers are identical, and 50% of the available resources on a server with dual 600MHz processors and 768 MB RAM is significantly less than 50% of the available resources on a server with dual GHz processors and 2 GB of RAM. Good point. Most sites (including yours) don't say even what you get at a minimum and that can be identified!

I'm not saying that I disagree with some of the choices you've made -- I'm considering moving from a very reliable host to your system -- but there is a difference in providing some information versus none whatsoever. It's a lot easier to make educated guesses when you have some of the specific items... such as the hardware upon which you are being hosted and the approx. ratio per server! Thank you for your courteous reply.

Originally posted by slinky
Good point. Most sites (including yours) don't say even what you get at a minimum and that can be identified!

Well, it's not very easy to identify exactly how much is being used by a given site - and for 99.5% of the sites out there, it isn't even an issue. The simple way around this problem is to just go for a dedicated server. That way, you don't have to worry about people telling you that your site is killing the server, as you're the only person on there. :D

I'm not saying that I disagree with some of the choices you've made -- I'm considering moving from a very reliable host to your system -- but there is a difference in providing some information versus none whatsoever. It's a lot easier to make educated guesses when you have some of the specific items... such as the hardware upon which you are being hosted and the approx. ratio per server!
I agree 100%. Our current site doesn't go into many of the details that customers such as yourself might be interested in. Allow me to provide just a little bit of information here:

If you sign up from now until about the end of June, your site will probably be going on the Hyperion server - which has dual 1GHz processors, 2 GB RAM (upgradable to 4 GB) and ~55 GB of space available (in a RAID 5 array). For a server like this, we can probably get 500+ shared accounts on it with no problems at all. However we don't like to run our servers at capacity, so it will probably be closer 400 (although it varies greatly with the type of customers hosted on the server). All of our subsequent shared servers will more than likely be similar to this configuration.

Our new website (which has been in the works for the past month) will provide many more details regarding our servers and services. We expect this site to launch within the next month.

Thank you for your courteous reply.
It was my pleasure. Have a happy Fathers Day. ;)

Best Regards,
Matt Lightner
mlightner@site5.com

Hey Matt, what are some tools you use to see how much resources a user is using. top is okay but it doesn't keep an accurate count. Are there any other tools/hints/suggestions besides checking userps every so often?

Originally posted by teck
Hey Matt, what are some tools you use to see how much resources a user is using. top is okay but it doesn't keep an accurate count. Are there any other tools/hints/suggestions besides checking userps every so often?
I actually wrote userps for use on Site5's servers, and when I became a member of the Darkorb staff, decided that it was useful enough that others might want it too. :D

You might try checking mysql by doing something like:
mysqladmin processlist | grep username
Which will tell you the approximate number of mysql connections that a user has open.

Another thing you might try is /scripts/watchuserps - another script I wrote which will actually tell you where the majority of the visitors to a given site are going. This is helpful when trying to determine what is causing a user's site to use a large number of resources. I'm not sure if this one is in the standard Cpanel distribution. If it isn't, let me know and I'll put it in there for you.

Beyond that, you might consider posting this question in the technical help forum, as I'm sure there are many sysadmin gurus here who would be willing to offer their own knowledge/experience.

Hope that helps. :)

Best Regards,
Matt Lightner
mlightner@site5.com

at least they leave you 10 (ten) days of time to move... others just kick ;)