Hahaha, digg ruined a site on dathorn

[cathode]

I really do not understand what you are asking for at all. Please clarify. The bottom line is that this particular site was just not suited to a shared hosting environment at all, it needed to be moved. Most issues we can resolve without having to do this.

Let's say that I have a customer who runs an advertisement caompaign and it is very successful, driving too much traffic to their website.

Then you shut it down.

Now, what should I do in this hypothetical situation?

[AndrewT]

1. Move the domain to a more suitable host.
or
2. Remove PHP/MySQL/Perl content that is almost always the problem. It really is amazing what plain old HTML can do. Large amounts of traffic and any kind of script is simply not a good combination for a shared hosting environment.

[cathode]

1. Move the domain to a more suitable host.
or
2. Remove PHP/MySQL/Perl content that is almost always the problem. It really is amazing what plain old HTML can do. Large amounts of traffic and any kind of script is simply not a good combination for a shared hosting environment.

Thanks. But, I assume the entire account will be locked down tight from us on the reseller level as well as the client's level. How do we get access to get into the files?

[AndrewT]

You can always submit a trouble ticket requesting a full current backup of the account to be created for you to download. This takes no time at all.

[-Oz-]

You can always submit a trouble ticket requesting a full current backup of the account to be created for you to download. This takes no time at all.

That is cool.

Cathode, I think I may add a little script that would create a static page of any database driven page that suddenly has a massive increase in hits. Might be complicated to do though but I know wiki does it when slashdot, digg, etc. link to their articles.

[samsam]

This issue always crops up, doesn't it?

This is a perennial issue around here:

- what/how/why etc was my site suspended,
- why might my site be suspended,
- what should I do if it is suspended.

Etc.

I think it deserves a FAQ, or a nice, prominent sticky if there is a good thread on it on this Forum, which just makes it clear the hows and whys of the issue.

I guess for website operators on Dathorn the take-away lesson is to always performance tune anything you place online on Dathorn, so you save on band-width, give users a better experience and also reduce the scope for a Dathorn account suspension.

Reduce those MySQL calls, reduce those PHP operations, turn on caching etc, etc. And sure, use plain old static HTML wherever possible, as Andrew suggests.

But ultimately, who can predict a digging or a Slashdot, and what its effects may be on even the most optimised, static HTML Dathorn site?

In the grand scheme of things I think Dathorn has to shoulder some of the blame if a cPanel server gets maxed out as a result of too much traffic, for at least two reasons.

First, each cPanel server is already running a s*load of CPU and RAM eating services even before a single web site is active on the server, let alone before one hundred or more accounts start running sites there. A cPanel based platform just doesn't give you a lot of performance head-room. So why be too harsh on users because of the deficiencies of cPanel's architecture?.

Secondly, Dathorn also offers with each cPanel account a wonderful 'Script Library' of big bloated apps like Joomla, Mambo, Invision, WordPress, even SugarCRM(!) that users can automagically install (and mis-configure), and which often can go wild and run their shared server into the ground, even without a Slashdotting. So Dathorn has to share some of the blame if a user maxes out the server, by practically inviting newbies to do their best to kill their own server.

I'm a big fan of throttling connections, bandwidth or CPU resources, before account suspension happens, if it were at all possible to use these options. A slowdown of the offending site, not a complete blackout.

I know it's not possible, but I wish it were.

[cathode]

Agreed.

Andrew, he mentions what I'm getting at: A sticky, FAQ, etc. some sort of place where we can go if this happens to us. This issue deserves it.


I have a new client running a content manager who is going to run an ad in a trade mag with 60,000 subscribers. I don't know how many hits this will mean...


but I am extremely nervous about it.

[AndrewT]

I quite honestly do not see what information there is to post...

[samsam]

Hey Andrew:

What about deploying something like this (mod_throttle) on Apache, as described at:

http://www.webhostgear.com/160.html

with more detail at:

http://www.snert.com/Software/mod_throttle/

Downloads for mod_throttle for a variety of Linuxes is at: RPMfind

or this (mod_bandwidth) also described at:

http://www.webhostgear.com/158.html

I also note that some other cPanel webhosts mention in their sales blurbs that as part of their cPanel/WHM setup they can do (under the WHM heading):

"...Optional propriety throttling programs can blunt bandwidth spikes on individual accounts and further prevent system overloads. "

(eg Interservers)

which may be a reference to mod_throttle, or something else. But since I've seen it on a few WHM providers pages, it may also indicate that there may be option within WHM to let sysadmins like Andrew define policies server wide to prevent system overloads.

It doesn't seem as if I can install something like mod_throttle or mod_bandwidth myself though on my subsidiary accounts, since an Apache re-start is required but that would be good, to cover off the situation cathode has described, or where you know that a customer site is likely to be popular, or where a customer needs to run something like a forum app that may be a real pig.

[AndrewT]

None of those will be something that we ever offer. There is no solution for hosting a site in the proper environment with appropriate scripts/optimization/etc. Furthermore, limiting by bandwidth usage is fairly meaningless as a site can use little bandwidth and still cause problems. The bandwidth is not the problem here.

[samsam]

None of those will be something that we ever offer. There is no solution for hosting a site in the proper environment with appropriate scripts/optimization/etc. Furthermore, limiting by bandwidth usage is fairly meaningless as a site can use little bandwidth and still cause problems. The bandwidth is not the problem here.

Aha. Fair enough.

But what of CPU-Cap (GPL)
http://www.tls-technologies.com/CPU/cpu-download.html

or other similar tools:
PRM (Process Resource Monitor) (GPL)

http://www.rfxnetworks.com/prm.php

or
WatchDog (commercial)

http://webhosting-tools.com/view.cgi/WatchDog

Are your users processes running wild? Is this causing stability problems for your server? If so, then you need to release the WatchDog to guard running processes from using too much of the available resources. WatchDog will faithfully protect your server by keeping tabs on running processes and killing any that exceed your preset limits.

Configuration is as simple as setting soft and hard limits on percent of CPU usage, percent of memory usage, amount of CPU time, and total elapsed time. You can even elect to only monitor some of these and exclude certain processes and users from monitoring.

which runs on RedHat and cPanel servers...

[AndrewT]

The bottom line is that it is the domain's responsibility to not overload the server. Our corrective action is not by throttling or anything like that. If a huge performance issue occurs because of one of your domains, it will be suspended. We are not going to implement any of that sort of software. It ultimately does very little good and is a detriment to the server and users. These issues are not as simple as finding a single program or set of programs to try and solve the problem - because it won't.

[buster916]

Theoretically speaking how much is too much

How much is too much traffic for a shared environment? I have friends who host sites at commercial providers like Powweb who claim to get hits as high as 5k-10k per day. None of my sites attract that many hits but what would be a comfortable daily or even hourly rate to be weary of. I think I read on this forum that even 20 simultaneous connections could be too many. That would mean that even a modest forum could be a problem if say it had 500 users and 20 of them decided to show up at the same time. I was always under the impression that even a shared environment could handle thousands of simultaneous conections.

[AndrewT]

How much is too much traffic for a shared environment?

Unfortunately there is no magic number. It all depends entirely upon the particular site, what scripts are running, etc.

[cathode]

So there's no way to know until the account gets cut off?