Where did the hosting guys go?
Greetings everyone,
Many of you have probably noticed a small hiatus in our blog writing activity. The Go Daddy hosting managers run the hosting blog and we have been extremely busy these past four weeks. I apologize for the lack of activity.
We are getting back to it now and are pulling together some articles that we hope will provide some useful information to you, our customers. If there are any key issues or technologies you would like discussed please post a comment. We are here to help you and help you succeed using our hosting services.
Also in the past month, we have implemented a change to our blog. It is now only accessible to Go Daddy customers vs. being a 100% public blog. That is why many of you are now seeing the login screen when trying to access the blog. This was done for a variety of reasons, but primarily because we see this blog as a service to our customers and not as something for the general public. Please let me know what you think of this change and if you have experienced any problems.
As always, I look forward to any comments you may have. We will be a lot more active in the month of October. Talk with you more soon.
Thanks,
Mike
We have our own private Club? Wow!
I'll vote for that.
Love GoDaddy.
Take Care,
Scooter
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Hi,
Nice to hear from you again. I usually read your blog to check new features that you add to the hosting service.
I have a question for you that maybe you could ask in a future entry or now if you can...
I have a Deluxe hosting plan with godaddy and I'm very happy with it (speed, uptime, etc.). I use it mainly to host a blog using Nucleus and to host some static html pages.
I'm receiving about 300 to 500 visitors a day that mainly read my blog and this number is increasing week by week.
I know that I have a lot of Monthly Data Transfer to use (1,000 GB/month) that I will never going to reach as my site is mainly text and doesn't use videos, etc.
But what about CPU and Memory usage? I mean... when will the hosting account became "little" for a given number of visitors a day or page views a day (assumming that I use Nucleus as a blog software)? When will I need to move to a virtual or dedicated server... 5,000, 10,000 visitors a day?
Can you give an estimation? This will be very helpful for people that have a hosting account and start to have many visitors a day.
Thanks.
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Very good Question. Sadly not an easy answer, it really depends on the application you are running. I don't hear the admins complaining a lot about Nucleus, so it must be halfway efficient. In general a few thousand requests a day on our servers is no problem at all assuming they are spread out. If they all come in a 2 minute time period then it will be a problem.
So my initial answer is you will be fine for quite a while on shared hosting, unless you are doubling every week or something. However, if it is just linear growth you have some room to grow. How quickly are you growing? What is your domain?
Thanks,
Mike
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Hi Mike,
Thanks for your reply. I know it is difficult to give an accurate response to my question, but I'll try to give you the info you requested to see if you can help me. Thanks in advance.
The domain is bellefem.com and it is mainly a Nucleus blog and some static pages. The page requests are spread out during the day (I checked in Traffic facts, so that should not be a problem). Besides that I know that Nucleus uses not very much resources to run.
The growth of the site is linear, but it depends also on the marketing campaigns I run. For example in March I had less than 1,000 visitors, but in April I went to nearly 6,000. Then in July around 14,000 per month until now.
The thing is that I keep most of my first time readers while I keep adding more with each marketing campaign I launch.
Also they read more pages every month and this number is growing faster...
June 17,391 page views
July 40,672 page views
August 55,936 page views
September 81,390 page views
Actually I have between 3,000 to 4,000 page views a day.
All the increases in visitors are made by adwords and other marketing campaigns and I'm going to launch a new one next month. I think I will reach 1,000 visitors a day before January.
I don't think the number of page views will continue to increase as until now, because I don't add so many content to the blog (just 1 to 2 articles per week) and the former readers tend to read just the new articles.
In short, by the end of the year I think I will reach around 1,000 visitors a day and about 7,000 to 10,000 page views a day.
I hope to reach from 3,000 to 5,000 visitors a day during next year and that will be the maximum I can go based on the number of searches made in google for the topic of my blog. Maybe I will be able to increase that number very little month by month, but not much above 5,000 visitors a day.
What do you think? When will the hosting account be to little (maybe not?)?
Besides of that, as you asked me my domain... is it possible to know an average of how much CPU and memory is using my site right know and estimate when I will have problems with it?
I am very worried about this because I've heard some horrible stories of hosting companies (not Godaddy for the moment) that cancel sites that are using to much resources without informing their costumers.
I'm really happy with Godaddy hosting and other services that I use, but I want to be prepared in advance before I need to move to a virtual or dedicated server.
Thanks for your time and sorry for my long comment, but I think this will be very helpful for other hosting users as well.
Christian
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I ran this by a few admins to see what they thought. Most could only say "depends". I did get one admin to give an estimate: when you're running into times of 50 concurrent threads (visitors), on any regular bassis. This could be anywhere from 500 to 5000 page loads a minute, depending on the load of your app. If your app is light, but still uses scripting and database connections, you'd probably being close to the limit at about 1000 page loads a minute. This is meant to be a rule of thumb, not a hard or soft limit. Just a guage. From your estimate of 10,000 page views a day, spread pretty evenly across the day, using the logic I laid out, you are not close to the limit. You could continue to grow on your shared hosting account for some time.
Again, it all depends on your application. How much RAM, CPU, database load your site creates is variable. One thing we see a lot of is improperly indexed tables. Missing an important index on a large table can easily bog down a database server. You'd be surprised how many sites are throwing red flags with low to moderate traffic, because they have large database tables without proper indexing! Throw an index on the "where" clause fields, and the problem disappears.
Load is not the most popular reason to move to Dedicated or Virtual Dedicated Hosting, however. Most people move for the flexibility. The ability to configure the server the way you want: optimize the database for your application, SSH or Remote Desktop access, install custom applications, configure Apache for CGI or dynamic modules, MySQL 5 for stored procedures, additional PHP extensions, run your own mail server, create accounts for your friends and family, sell shared hosting accounts and more. When you're ready to administer your own server and have full control over your environment, move to Dedicated or Virtual Dedicated Hosting. If you just need a place to run your popular Nucleus site, the shared environment works for most people. Keep in mind, with Dedicated Hosting, you are responsible for the backups, patching and security of your server. It may not be a leap you want to take without some training. But, check out our "Assisted Service" plans, if you want a Dedicated server, without the headache of keeping up with backups, security scanning, patching and monitoring!
Dave.
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Thanks Dave,
Your answer was very helpful.
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Would it be possible to have a forum or discussion group for us developers?
Often, I find myself trying to understand the "quirks" of GoDaddy's shared hosting setup. The Help Center seems to only have basic information and the email/phone support seems to refer to the help center based on keywords on your request (often not providing a real solution).
I would love an advanced group where developers could discuss programming issues we're having with GoDaddy's hosting services. A place where we could have access to the experts at GoDaddy (not just the help desk).
For example, I spent a few days trying to tweak fetchmail to work with GoDaddy's POP3 servers. And others were unaware of tricks to get free email working with aliased domains.
Thanks,
Mario
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This has come up before, it's under consideration. That's all I can say at this time.
Dave.
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Adding an RSS or Atom feed to this blog would be pretty useful, especially if posting to it will be irregular.
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This is available under the "Syndicate this blog" section on the right. However, the requirement to be logged in will cripple many RSS readers. I have a Firefox extension that I use to read the entries and comments, but I have to login manually first, for it to work. I'm interested in other people's opinion of this. In order to offer the RSS feed, it would have to be open to the public, and we decided to keep this blog closed. Pro/Con. Would you rather this be a private club or open to the public so the RSS feeds work without limitation?
Dave.
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Hi Dave,
Question:
You wrote; 'Keep in mind, with Dedicated Hosting, you are responsible for the backups'.
Does that mean that GoDaddy does make backups for the other services?
I mean in the help files it say's clearly no?
Thanks.
--
Rick
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Shared and Vded hosting do have backup schedules, but they are at a server level, not an individual account level. In words, if you wipe out your shared hosting account by accident, we cannot restore it. However, if the entire server goes belly up, we can restore it. Ded and Vded accounts do have an FTP backup add-on that provides an FTP backup location for you to utilize. You can configure Plesk and cPanel to automate backups to this FTP backup directory. If you're not using Plesk or cPanel on Ded/Vded, then it's up to you to figure out how to keep your server backed up. Alternatively, check out the new Assisted Service plan available on Dedicated Hosting, it comes with automated backups, no need for the FTP Backup add-on. I am about to post a new article on this topic, check it out.
Dave.
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We transferred to GoDaddy in early August, & were disappointed that this blog wasn't active. So welcome back, we're happy to see you!
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I am a start-up internet advertising business and currently have more questions than I have answers. I am currently collecting all my data, it will be large, not exactly sure how to migrate it off of Excel unto my site in a way that will sort and make sense. I will not launch until summer of 07, so I am in no hurry. I have been working on this very part-time for 10months.
Questions, I am need of some advice to start off with the first phase of data collection. I have a MySQL acct. with GO DADDY but not sure how to use it. I am in the process of hiring a programmer who can maybe train me so I can get all the data entry accomplished over the next 3 months, and compile it and migrate it correctly. I will be selling featured advertising, to include banner slide shows w/narrative, to senior housing facilities, starting off with Nursing Homes. I have no experience in data base collection and need a good resource to guide me. Any suggestions, or any consultant out there who will train me for a small fee. I want to learn the process.
Thanks for any advice!
This is my first BLOG!
Charyl
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I am pretty sure this blog is totally dead.
I submitted a comment to another item weeks ago and it has never appeared.
Nor did I get any acknowledgment or rejection email.
I assume that is because not even the moderators are reading this blog any more.
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No, we are still here. Go Daddy is one of those companies that actually speeds up in the 4th quarter and we have been very busy. Some of the staff this week will be catchting up the blog including myself.
Thanks,
Mike
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