Premium hosting recommendations - apart from iFastNet?

Informal
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So I bit the bullet a few weeks ago, got premium hosting in iFastNet, and I’m slowly starting to regret it.

I took InfinityFree as an intro to iFastNet, and the migration as the natural growth step to take, but I’m realizing now that that’s not very accurate. Even the auto-migration was something I could (should?) have done myself.

Googling a bit it looks like iFastNet seems to be among the cheapest, but I don’t see glowing reviews, and I suspect that I’m getting what I paid for. The support is scarily bare-bones, there’s some support pages that look seem to be well over 5 years outdated… in comparison this forum is incredible.

I’ve already spent too much time trying to save money, and I should probably start moving towards paying more so that I can faff around less. Maybe I could have jumped to some other premium hosting instead of iFN, and maybe I should still do it. Has anyone already gone through this migration, tried other hosting providers, decided on something else?

My use case is a wordpress blog with maybe a few dozen articles, mainly text, no monetization, not expecting many readers (1000 per year would be probably a lot). Should be on the simple side of the spectrum, I’d hope! But even writing in the standard Wordpress editor has caused iFN to go over IO limits.

I considered a fully managed hosting like wordpress.com, but the prices are hard to justify.

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Thank you for your helpful feedback.

If I understand your message correctly, your main concerns are:

  • The quality of the support isn’t good enough. The KB articles are out of date.
  • The auto-migration wasn’t what you expected.

I do have some question though.

Many of the KB pages are indeed quite old. That’s not necessarily a problem though, some of our articles are quite old too because many processes just don’t change a lot over time.

Did this actually cause issues for you where support (either through articles of staff help) didn’t provide you with the help you need?

That’s true, in most cases you can do the migration yourself (except if you need to move free subdomains - only iFastNet’s staff can do that). However, iFastNet can automatically pull in all files and databases from your free account, update the configuration and change the DNS without you having to do anything. That should still be better than having to do it yourself.

I admit, having a more seamless experience would be nicer. However, free hosting is built in a fundamentally different way than premium hosting, so in it’s current way it will never be completely seamless.

But you seem to imply you would have rather done the migration yourself. Can I ask why that is?

It sounds indeed quite simple. However, hitting IO limits specifically is not the result of general website use, but rather specific activities that consume a lot of IO usage. Backup plugins are notorious for causing high IO usage. If you had a backup plugin on your site, that may have caused the issue.

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The times I tried searching for anything in the articles I couldn’t find anything. There’s not many of them anyway, I’d say.

I opened a couple of support tickets, but the answers were pretty useless. For example, I asked for more information about what exactly entails the (paid!) ID protection service for the DNS registry, because the dashboard offers exactly 0 explanations. And support only answered where to find the button to activate it!

Another ticket was about the IO limits. The answer was less useful than any of your (Admin) answers I can find in this forum - plus ended in a rather crass try to upsell without even explaining how, or how much, would that help.

Actually I’m thinking that a good summary is that service in IF feels premium, while in iFN it feels like what I’d expect from free hosting.

I expected, possibly naively, that the migration would end up with my wordpress installation and its couple of test articles just appearing in the new domain and account. They didn’t, just the files and DB were copied over, and then I had to make sense of the new dashboard, panel, facilities, reinstall wordpress, etc to reach the same point I was in before the migration.

If I had to do it again, I’d just do it myself, because at least I’d be 100% sure of where things are and why.

No, I don’t have any backup plugin (the site is so bare that it doesn’t merit backing up yet!), nor did any kind of bulk activity.
I tried correlating IO usage to my activity, but the graphs showed no peaks, just the coarsest warning of “You have reached the limits within the past 24 hours” and rather flat graphs. Maybe there is some bucketing happening? No information!

To be fair, I am checking now the resource usage graphs and I do see recent high IO activity peaks while the site should be idle (since no one knows about the site yet). So I guess I’ll have to keep an eye on it.

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Those peaks I mentioned are making me realize that support’s answer was actually a distraction, so it is worse than useless. They told me to register for CloudFlare, use a WP cache plugin (while being careful about plugins), etc. And I’m doing all of those. But those will help once I have visitors, right?

But I have no visitors yet! And I am already having IO limit trouble even when logged out?
Maybe some plugin or theme auto-update threw IO close to the limit? Sounds then like IO limits are absurdly low, right? What will happen once there’s visitors?

I’ve disabled all auto-updates for WP/plugins/themes and will keep an eye. And I guess I’ll have to re-assess wordpress.com :grimacing:

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WordPress.com are not like other general hosting providers — it have cheap plans that if you just wanted a WordPress and no more (So without SSH, phpMyAdmin, etc.) And when it comes to more general plans it wasn’t cheap.

I don’t want to advertise other providers, but you really should do some more researches.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Changing File Permission

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You had to reinstall WordPress after the migration? That shouldn’t be necessary. The migration process should automatically move the files, databases and update the settings so that everything just works. That’s basically how you would do a manual migration, but without having to do it yourself.

IO usage is generally not directly correlated to website traffic, so this one is a bit hard to judge.

I do wonder which account this is though because none of the accounts linked to this forum profile have any recent IO usage at all.

That wouldn’t be my recommendation for high IO usage. For high CPU usage or poor performance, sure, but for IO usage specifically I would expect caching to do more harm than good, and Cloudflare to be irrelevant.

That’s indeed not a very helpful support answer.

Agreed. WordPress.com is not like a regular web hosting account, and more like a managed website builder. With a web hosting account, you get a lot more flexibility regarding the plugins and themes you use, and also get the ability to host multiple website, free email hosting and a free domain name, all for a fraction of the price of WordPress.com.

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That was 4 weeks ago so TBH I don’t remember the details. I think I couldn’t ascertain why things weren’t working and suspected it was because the migrated stuff was in a subdomain with its own subdirectory, which looked like needed extra configuration in the destination? And the Softaculous installer detected but didn’t totally get the existing installation?

Probably this was something easy to fix for a proper webmaster, but bad enough that a ~beginner like me couldn’t easily fix. So I took the probably-longer-but-safer route of reinstalling.

I don’t remember what date was that. And if I try looking at the stats history, it errors out! Resource usage stats in cpanel with the “last 30 days” option:

Error
Traceback (most recent call last): File “/usr/share/lve-stats/lvechart.py”, line 29, in exitcode = main(config.read_config())
…

Anyway, I got an email that my Wordpress got updated from 6.3 to 6.3.1 tonight. And of course the Resource Usage dashboard in cPanel again says that I reached my IO limit in the past 24 hours!
Can that mean that the update got botched and my installation might be broken now?

Screenshot 2023-08-30 at 10.18.50 am
Screenshot 2023-08-30 at 10.18.50 am1310×1902 262 KB

I assume that the fault near “Aug-29 03:12PM” is the problem (is not my timezone and couldn’t find a way to set it, but corresponds with the WP email, assuming the server is in EDT TZ).
If you could take a look I’d be really grateful. Or ask someone in iFN who can actually help?

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Out of curiosity, I checked the VPS upgrade options suggested by iFN support. I found 2 links, the public one advertises Linux 3.10+. This is at least 5 years outdated. (there’s another link in client area that instead cites Linux 2.6.x!)
I checked what my cPanel terminal says with uname -a. Linux 2.6.32 - again at least 5 years outdated.

Is this normal in the web hosting world? For me it’s sounding just plain scary. Even the upgrade advertising is outdated? No client ever upgrades? No staff ever fixes things?

(And no upgrade option ever says how IO limits would improve anyway!)

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Just wanted to say, buying VPS from iFN wasn’t a clever idea. They didn’t deserve their price.

This can be normal though, as kernel version doesn’t matter that much. We need stability, not those shiny new functions.

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FWIW, my user in iFN is displayed as “discover” in my cPanel, and I registered using the same email I used here in the forum and in IF.

Doesn’t that still leave out years of bugfixes, including security ones?

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Both premium hosting and free hosting have IO usage limits. However, on premium hosting, the only thing that happens if you hit the limit is that your account will be throttled. There are no 24 hour suspensions like with free hosting.

So a brief spike hitting the limit isn’t a big deal as long as the general performance of your site is still OK.

I really can’t. That’s premium hosting cPanel, I have no access to any of the premium stuff. Your only option is iFastNet support I think.

The kernel version is correct. The VPS platform runs on OpenVZ 7, which runs on Linux 3.10. Yes, it’s old, but still supported until next year.

It does unfortunately mean you’re stuck with older versions of most operating systems. So while I stand behind iFastNet’s premium hosting, I think there are better options for VPS hosting.

I’m not sure about that. I checked the server my own testing account is on, and it appears to be running on AlmaLinux 8.

It happens. Useful information about plan specs gets copied and repeated in many different pages and articles. Then, when the information changes (because of upgrades, for example), then it’s hard to locate all the places where the information should be updated. It’s not that people don’t want to update the information, it’s that they simply aren’t aware the incorrect information lives somewhere else.

If you see inconsistencies like that here, please do report them so I can fix them, and if necessary clarify what’s correct and what isn’t. I assume iFastNet would appreciate the same.

Again, nobody here has access to iFastNet’s premium hosting. I assumed you were referring to IO usage on your free accounts which prompted you to upgrade, not IO usage on your premium account. I can’t see, check or do anything with the premium account from my end.

Also, InfinityFree account usernames are globally unique, whereas cPanel usernames are only unique for the server.

The big difference between free and premium hosting is that there are no 24 hour suspensions if you hit the limits. If you want to know the IO limits for every plan, you’ll have to ask iFastNet, because I don’t know.

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Oh, I misunderstood what you wrote earlier then. Thank you anyway.

I asked iFN support

What exactly happens when the IO limit is reached? For example, can disk operations fail, or only get slower?
For example, my wordpress installation got updated during my night, and now the dashboard says that the IO limit was reached.
Does that mean that my installation might now be broken?

I was sent to “second line support”, which just repeated that my domain is serving wordpress and that I should install a caching plugin.

So once again, Admin’s answer was much more useful/educative than iFN support. (And IIUC, probably the account gets throttled but no files should end up e.g. broken)

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That’s indeed how it works. Enforcing limits is one thing, but we definitely wouldn’t want them to cause permanent damage to your site by terminating half finished file transactions.

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And would you expect the throttling to be momentary, simply capping the max IO while the peak is happening? Or would it somehow apply a penalty even after the peak is gone?

Asking because the resource usage dashboard showing the message of “You have reached the limits within the past 24 hours” makes me wonder if some extra slow down is being applied during those 24 hours.

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Your account’s IO limit is set to a certain value (2 MB/s for my own Super Premium account). If software on your account is trying to do more IO than 2 MB/s, it will be limited to 2 MB/s by slowing down storage access or pausing the process entirely.

With most systems like that, the throttling is usually a second at most. Every second, the counter resets and the site is resumed.

That information is more for the situations where you wonder “hey, my website has been having weird slowdowns today, could it be caused by high resource usage”, and then you see this text, and you know that it could be the case. Without having to dive in the detailed metrics to know whether the limits were hit.

So no, your account is limited to the resources you are offered, but you are not punished for hitting the limits.

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