Hi,

I'm paying $7.95 per month for what seems like a phenomenal web hosting service. You get PHP/MySQL, CPanel5, 20 gigs of space, great tech support, etc., etc.

The only thing that's been bothering me is that I'll be surfing my site and it goes from lightening-fast to super slow and then back again. There's about 5-10 "hiccups" like this each hour where a 4kb page will take 10 seconds+ to load. What might this be? Is it common on shared hosting plans?

Any advice would sure be appreciated.

Peter Schultheiss
http://www.junglepost.com/

Running mulitple traceroutes to and from your server might shed some light on where your problem might be starting from. Also, if your host gives you shell access, it might be helpfull to run the top command and see whats going on.

Ultimately this problem can be caused by many issues. Be it a bottleneck along the way, problems with your ISP, issues with your host. Perhaps if you post us a traceroute around the same time you experience this issue next time we might be able to help shed some light on your problem.

Please forgive my ignorance, but how would I go about running a traceroute? Would this site do the trick: http://www.tracert.com/cgi-bin/trace.pl

Yes, that's fine.
Additionally you can run a "tracert yourdomain.com" (Windows) or "traceroute yourdomain.com" (Linux) on your own computer.

If you run the traceroute from tracert.com it won't really help much as it would run the trace from a remote location.

Open up an MS-DOS window and type tracert domain.com ( of course replacing domain.com with your own ).

Originally posted by pschultheiss
Hi,

I'm paying $7.95 per month for what seems like a phenomenal web hosting service. You get PHP/MySQL, CPanel5, 20 gigs of space, great tech support, etc., etc.

The only thing that's been bothering me is that I'll be surfing my site and it goes from lightening-fast to super slow and then back again. There's about 5-10 "hiccups" like this each hour where a 4kb page will take 10 seconds+ to load. What might this be? Is it common on shared hosting plans?

Any advice would sure be appreciated.

Peter Schultheiss
http://www.junglepost.com/

Do you mean you got 20 GB of traffic? Because I saw with a tracert that your site is on a Cogent connection, and sometimes it happens that you get these peaks with them. Not always, but you are just unlucky to have the peaks.
When I saw the price of 7.95 dollar and your problem, I already had figured you are using Cogent bandwidth (if you don't know what Cogent is, please do a search on that name on this forum).
You might consider moving to an other host, which will cost you more but will also give you way more speed.

Success!

Jacco

Hi,

You can use traceroute.org for your site from world.

Have a nice day
:)

Yes it could be cogent. Also check with the company. It could be someone has like a download website on your server and may be hogging resources when soemoen needs to download something. Traceroutes will also sho very much were the trouble comes otu from.

Thank you all for your input, I've learned quite a bit. Based on what I saw it looks like I may need to check out another host.

Any suggestions? I'll pay up to $50 a month.

Thanks again,
Peter

try the request forum..$50/month..you can get a semi ded with that.!

With that budget I think you'll be able to find a very good host using quality, multihomed providers.

I personally have nothing against Cogent. I do however think that hosts who rely on that alone (or any single provider) are playing with fire. There are plenty of datacenters out there have have reams to providers supplying bandwidth, and while the obvious costs are higher, the overall quality of service is worth every dime.

Greg Moore