I know most rave about how good hostmysite are. They do have great support and competitive plans, but even for a shared plan (CF+) I have had the same issues for a few months now.
My issue is simple, they seem to restart JRun on average 5-6 times per day. PER DAY!
Hmm, is this not a little too frequent? I have a couple of sites on there and it seems everytime I visit the site (5-6 times a day) the application restarts. Different application, different frameworks which work fine on local and stage but not on hostmysite.
I asked their tech team about it and they said there is a problem with some of the sites on the shared servers which means they have to restart JRun around 4 times a day (which I took to mean 8 times!).
At the end of the day good support and price doesn’t really make a difference when your site goes up and down more than a kid on a jumping castle.
I’ll have to monitor for a little longer, speak to tech support then consider moving the site elsewhere.
Has anyone else experienced this with the shared plans?
I had so many problems with HostMySite after the recent CF8 Upgrade that I ended up switching hosts. Until the upgrade, I never had a problem before that save for the very occasional server restart, but they seem to have experienced a lot of configuration problems after the upgrade. I switched to Edge Web Hosting who has been great so far. They are more expensive, but they limit the number of sites on the server to mitigate the risks involved with shared hosting.
Rachel Maxim
August 22nd, 2007
Bummer… I was almost considering moving to HostMySite too - since they’re using CF8 and had a discount for those that signed up for CF8 beta hosting - but having your site unavailable that many times a *day* must be pretty annoying…
I’m still with Hosting A to Z and they’ve been pretty good, but coincidentally my site went down some time this morning and has been down all day! It’s very unlike them to have such a long outage, as it’s only the third or fourth outage I’ve noticed this *year*.
Fingers crossed they can move you to another server or something!
Justin Carter
August 22nd, 2007
@Rachel: Yep, I had this error for a day until I notified them and they fixed it:
access denied (java.io.FilePermission C:Coldfusion8wwwrootWEB-INFcftagscomponent.cfc read
@Justin: Maybe if I start making some noise they’ll move me to a better server. Still…with SeeFusion you think they’d be able to track and manage ‘rogue’ sites which effect other shared users.
Michael Sharman
August 22nd, 2007
We believe this to be happening on the web central servers we host on as well. I think it plays with our modelglue-reactor sites especially as they have to re-load so often, however i could be wrong.
Geoff Pennington
August 22nd, 2007
I’ve found that simply by contacting a sales person, you can have your site moved to a different shared box. I was on a box that had some difficulties, and all it took was one call, and a few hours later, all the problems disappeared. I have about 6 clients on HMS, and they seem to be doing very well.
Nick Kwiatkowski
August 22nd, 2007
That’s a good tip Nick, I’ll give that a go.
Michael Sharman
August 22nd, 2007
I’ve been with Hostmysite for a long time. They do have jrun issues from time to time, but overall they are always working to address the coding issues on those servers (I know because I’ve called a lot). It’s tough on shared; but they’ve used different jvm’s, self-healing technology and other tools to track stuff down. Additionally while they had a few rough days during the upgrade (as every host I use I would expect to in order to balance out hundreds of web sites on one jvm) my sites have now at least tripled in uptime since the upgrade. So, kudos to Hostmysite and Adobe for working to make a better product… I’m going to stick it out.
Juan
August 22nd, 2007
we have at least 40 customer sites now with hostmysite and having been have major problems since the CF8 upgrad (I’m tacking them on my blog). While Nick is correct that they will move you to another box, it’s just a temporary solution. We’ve moved several customer site 3 to 4 times already because of the instabilities with the shared boxes. Their solution always seems to be either getting a dedicated server or VPS. While we have considered getting a VPS, the 20 gig disk space is very limiting.
tony petruzzi
August 22nd, 2007
As with any new software upgrade, there is always a risk of running into some type of issue. You can perform upgrades in a test environment, however, no matter how successful those tests go, the real test comes when you put the upgrade into a production environment.
At HostMySite.com, we try to anticipate many of the problems that could possibly arise for our customers. For those that do come up, we are always prompt in getting it taken care of. In response to many clients running into problems with using Model-glue, MachII, FuseBox and other frameworks, we have opened a ticket with Adobe to assist us. We have also put a halt on our upgrade to ColdFusion 8 until a resolution has been found.
HostMySite.com has always been a leader in Customer Service and has gained the respect from the hosting community throughout the years. We certainly do not want our reputation to be affected by our decision to adopt ColdFusion 8. If you are hosting with us and are currently experiencing any issues with a recent ColdFusion 8 upgrade, please give us a call at 877-215-4678 and one of our Technical Support Representatives will be able to provide you with assistance.
Regards,
Joshua Tobiansky
Joshua Tobiansky | Call Center Manager | HostMySite.com | Office: 302 731-4948 | 260 350 Pencader Dr. Suite B | Newark, Delaware 19702| http://www.HostMySite.com
Joshua Tobiansky
August 22nd, 2007
Ditto to what everyone else has said. Horrible performance. Many crashes/restarts per day. Blame it on my code (which has run flawlessly on other hosts). Switched to different server (no better). And then tell me I should move to a VPS.
I’m done with HMS. It really is too bad, because the tools are pretty good and the tech support staff has actually been pretty good.
jeff
August 22nd, 2007
Just want to throw my 2 cents in here as a technician/sales rep/cf programmer. I’ve been working at HostMySite.com for 6 years now and we’ve progressed from CF 4.5 all the way through CF 8. In terms of stability CF has never been as adept at isolating resources from clients on a shared server as other languages, and we’ve put a lot of effort into correcting this deficiency. With the upgrade from CF7->CF8 a bit of instability seems to have been introduced (nothing like 5->6 though) and we’re working very hard to address that fact. Upon reflection it would have been better if we hadn’t migrated as many CF7 servers as we did at first, but all our pre-migration tests indicated the transition would be seamless and would actually dramatically improve performance. In some cases that was true, however in others notsomuch.
In short, I understand that this is a hard situation to be in, but if possible I’d urge you to be patient because I honestly don’t know any other company that has as much experience with shared CF as HostMySite.com.
Also, keep in mind that as good as our shared servers are, if you’re looking for a ‘mission critical’ application that needs 100% uptime then you should really be looking at VPS or Dedicated environments, as they offer much more stability than shared in general since you don’t have to rely on the coding skills (or lack thereof) of those that share a server with you.
Jamie Price
August 27th, 2007
Hi Jamie, thanks for the comments they are much appreciated coming from inside HMS.
Although I experienced a some issues with the migration, my outstanding issue is the instability of sites on shared plans.
I completely hear where you are coming from in terms of “mission critical” and VPS plans. But even yesterday I went to my site…nothing.
This morning I opened my inbox and got another email stating the app had restarted and timed out on initialisation (over 50 seconds). In my other environments the app takes around 25-30 seconds to initialise.
But still…why is it restarting SO many times per day? It really seems as though JRun is being restarted every hour.
This can’t be right even on a shared plan?
Michael Sharman
August 27th, 2007
Here’s some more information about shared hosting some of you may not know about - for a full description check my blog post at: http://www.gideonmarken.com/index.cfm/blog/1690/
Here’s the jist…
“All ColdFusion processes must complete in under 50 seconds. If a process takes 50 seconds or longer, the process gets cancelled.”
* This is not written on their site.
* This is not listed as a feature of their hosting packages.
* This is not listed in the Admin area where you manage your site.
* Apparently, not even the general support staff know about this limitation.
* If they kill off your processes, they don’t inform you - you would have to discover that it is happening either on your own or if you are lucky, a user would inform you
========
Hey Jamie Price @ HostMySite - You are saying that shared hosting can’t offer 100% uptime - yet on the Builder description page you have the following listed:
99.9+% network uptime
I guess that only means ‘you’ are up, and does not apply to your servers? That’s quite misleading - most people will read that as “My site will be up 99.9% of the time.”
And yes - I too noticed the site down and restarting from time to time. So far I’m not impressed with HostMySite except withhe response time by support, which was great.
Gideon Marken
August 29th, 2007
Agreed on all points Gideon, I only found out about the 50 seconds (from SeeFusion) through my own exception handling.
It is interesting the way hosts word things like:
“99.9+% network uptime”
Obviously something needs looking at in regards to the ColdFusion application server because sites are consistently NOT getting 99.9% “uptime”.
Also interesting was the copy and paste response from Joshua Tobiansky which I saw on another thread comment (different blog). Maybe HMS are doing a little bit of damage control re: the upgrade to v8 which by the way doesn’t seem to be helping…I just checked and my site was down again. I’m not surprised.
A note though, possibly they’ve increased the timeout to 65 seconds:
“SeeFusion terminated request: Page Time at 67218ms >= limit of 65000ms (rule “latentpages”)”
Still my application:
1. Needed restarting
2. Didn’t start within the allocated timeframe (when it should take 25 - 30 seconds)
Why why why why does JRun need restarting so often?
Time to stop moaning and find another host.
I’ll post my findings on other comparable hosts.
Michael Sharman
August 29th, 2007
It’s splitting hairs a bit I’ll admit, but even in your first post re: uptime you mentioned it states there is a 99.9% *network* uptime guarantee. This is reinforced by our Uptime Guarantee/SLA shown here:
http://hostmysite.com/termsofservice/uptime/
Note that it guarantees the network, infrastructure, and hardware, but not SOFTWARE, such as the CF Application Server. The reason for this is quite simple…if we did and then sold you and 12 people a shared hosting account with CF on the same server, I can guarantee that within 1 week you could cause enough problems on the server through bad coding to cause CF to restart on a continual basis if you wanted to. In short, there is precious little you can do in some cases to prevent problems from bleeding over from one shared client to another. We address this in a number of ways, including:
- SeeFusion: Big help. Killing long threads is crucial to keeping a stable shared CF server.
NOTE: I’ve just put in a request to the person who maintains our support articles. You have a good point about the 50 second limit not being on our website; it belongs in the CF FAQ.
- Root Cause Analysis (RCA): Whenever a server (or service) on our network is repaired an incident is recorded. If a certain threshold is met (say, 3 incidents in a day) we then investigate in detail by assigning a Tier 3 technician to review the incidents as well as the CF logs in order to determine what is happening at the time of the outages. This typically points us to a site that is causing the problems by consistently running long queries that SeeFusion must kill, or one that is riddled with CF errors that causes undue strain on the CF Application Server.
While I can’t tell you exactly why you’re having problems without working on the issue myself, I hope this helps with understanding our methodology in this. If you’d like me to examine a particular ticket for you, simply email me the ticket number - jamie (at) hostmysite.com.
Jamie Price
August 31st, 2007
The answer here is pretty simple. Coldfusion was not designed for a shared environment..period. However, for some, its not cost effective to get a VPS or dedicated solution to host their coldfusion code. When it comes down to it, its a give and take situation. Like the guy before me said, if its 100% critical to have 100% uptime, you shouldn’t be on a shared hosting plan, especially not for coldfusion. Coldfusion 8 was designed with an eye toward shared hosting stability, but it seems this release has a ways to go before adobe can address the issues regarding cf8 and shared hosting (especially with any cf framework you may use). So will moving to a new host fix your issues with shared cf stability? Probably not. Just my 2c.
Bilbo Hostins
September 8th, 2007
Jamie / Joshua, can you give some more details about the ticket you opened with Adobe and any response you’ve had from them?
Can you also give any details about what might be unique about the HMS environment that causes such poor performance after the upgrade when folks are usually seeing big performance improvments with CF8? Are you using an unsupported JVM perhaps (I know some people reported memory leaks with JRockit that don’t occur with the supported Sun JVM, for example)?
Thanx!
Sean Corfield
October 3rd, 2007
I had 6 sites at HostMySite for a few years. But their issues with ColdFusion were getting worse and worse, so I finally left. It actually seemed to me that SeeFusion was making the problem worse.
The sites I had there were ridiculously small (1,000 hits per day), and 100% uptime was not my goal. But I too had problems with the server being restarted 5-6 times a day.
I eventually bought a server on eBay for $175, then got a colo plan for $25 a month at ColoPronto.
My problems were solved for much less than a VPS would cost at HMS.
Karl
November 20th, 2007
Hi Karl,
I hear you and have also pulled my site down from HMS.
Not a bad idea getting your own server in a colo. I might have to check that out.
Thanks for your response.
Michael
Michael Sharman
November 20th, 2007
Are the CF8 problems continuing or have things gotten better. I really like what HMS offers but all of these problems are concernng me. I would get the CF VPS plan.
Richard
January 16th, 2008
Hi Richard,
Unfortunately I’m no longer with HMS so I don’t know. I had the same issues up until I left thought.
Michael Sharman
January 17th, 2008
I have been with HostMySite since before they were supposed to be to awesome. I will say this, they are the best hosting company I have found yet. The only downside to that comment is, I use the Windows hosting plan… No CF8 for me. Tech support is very very nice.
If you have something that is not working out in the Shared Server environment, maybe you should consider getting your own dedicated server. Just a thought…
Chad
May 20th, 2008
I like many others have bad experiences with hosting companies. Thank god I finally found one that supports my needs and answers the phone!! Server Intellect has gone above and beyond to support us and our hosting needs.
Damon
June 6th, 2008