Hosting on Site5 - a frustrating experience 5

Posted by Adrian O'Connor Fri, 29 Jun 2007 08:47:00 GMT

This blog is hosted on a Site5 server. If you click on more than a couple of pages, you are almost certain to experience a page timeout. The site will simply fail to respond. This happens alot.

You can, therefore, judge Site5’s quality of service for yourself. As a service provider, this is their most important asset, and they don’t have it.

I was drawn in to Site5 by their claims of honesty and openness. No matter how ‘open’ and ‘honest’ Site5 are in every other respect (and they are), they do not provide a stable hosting platform and, frustratingly, they will not discuss it with the customers or let it be discussed in their forums. That is neither open nor honest.

The problem of daily service outages has been a feature since I signed up last November. It wasn’t such a serious problem then, and I hoped that before long they would fix the glitches. Unfortunately, the little glitches (two or three times a day) became big glitches, and now my sites are either slow or down for large portions of the day.

I contacted them many times. For a while, every day when the site went down (most commonly around 4PM GMT), I would log a support call. My hope was that with these daily tickets appearing, someone would take notice. Unfortunately, all I got were lousy non-answers and the tickets were immediately closed. I haven’t bothered for a while, but yesterday I posted to their forums to see if anyone else was as frustrated as me. It seems so, although the thread was soon moved to a ‘private’ area, and is no longer visible.

I can’t recommend Site5. I am currently evaluating other options, including the dedicated options from 123-reg, and shall write about them in due course. I am disappointed – information on Site5’s website shows a similar outlook and philosophy that we at Arctus share – openness, politeness, responsiveness, understanding – and I really wanted them to deliver.

I sincerely hope that Site5 manage to sort out whatever ‘glitches’ are plaguing their servers, be it pooly written websites running badly written queries, or individual users abusing the service. Either way, they are failing to deliver the most important thing right now.

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  1. bigred about 5 hours later:

    I have had the same problems. You and I have posted together and had our post ripped down. Today because of a “router” problem, I can not put up my post about my complaints. At least your blog post is more professional than what mine will be if I can get into my site today. My if it ever goes up is all emotion. LOL

    It’s just getting really frustrating. Please everyone, do yourself a favor and stay away from Site5!!!

    http://www.bigredsplace.com/?p=275

  2. Lance 3 days later:

    I’m not timing out at all. I’m thinking about signing up and it seems like your blog is performing decently. What is it running? Wordpress?

  3. Adrian 3 days later:

    Hi Lance,

    I’m running Typo (version 4), with some minor customisations and my own theme. I chose it in particular because I was learning Rails at the time, and I wanted to see how the themes and plugins worked. I do like the look of Wordpress, and I think I’d have gone with that ordinarily.

    I suppose I exagerated the extent of my downtime with Site5, because the site is up most of the time. Last week was just particularly bad, and I think you can appreciate how an hour of uptime can be completely overshaddowed by single a minute of downtime. However, do check back now and again because the problems tend to show up Mon-Fri during US business hours.

    I think that the problem stems from just one or two sites on the shared servers. They cause either Apache or MySQL to reach a state of saturation, whereupon it stops responding, and some deamon restarts it 60 seconds later. Downtime usually lasts 60 seconds.

    It’s also worth noting that Site5 re-instated the thread in the duscussion forums.

    I’m logging the availability of my site over the coming weeks. I’ll post updates when I have any useful data.

    Thanks, Adrian

  4. Adrian 18 days later:

    A quick update…

    Since I wrote this article, my site has been far more responsive, but the mail (imap) server is still unavailable quite often. I have been monitoring my blog and main site availability, and I seem to be levelled at about 5 outages (of less than a few minutes each) most days on average.

    I wrote a Ruby service to monitor my server, but it seems NET::Http is a little buggy and it crashes quite often, so my data is incomplete. More updates will be posted in due course, not least to report that I have over come my network problems in Ruby.

  5. Adrian about 1 month later:

    Another very quick update, for those wondering whether to go with Site 5 or not.

    It seems that database reads are better now—my website and blog are both available most of the time now. However, database writes and the mail server are very, very unstable. Our webmail dies almost everytime you send a mail or refresh a folder, and this blog dies pretty much everytime I make a post. It is incredibly frustrating, because you don’t know whether the data you sent was actually processed or not.

    Site5, despite being a great company, provide unacceptably poor quality of service. I strongly recommend that you avoid them.

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