Searching For A New Webhost (again) A refugee from x10Hosting checks out Trap17.com

[travstatesmen 0]

On 9-Aug-2008 I decided to set up a new site for my MMOG clan, I play Travian on the .com servers and I'm setting up a new clan that spans multiple alliances and metas, and even multiple Travian gaming worlds. We consider ourselves to be above the pettiness of inter-alliance and inter-meta warfare, and thus many of our members are from opposing factions, yet we all work in together as a team, pulling the strings like puppet-masters.

 

Anyway, I scouted around and found what I thought looked like a great hosting deal. I got a free webhost, which the review at free-webhosts.com said did not have forced adverts (first mistake, as they do!) and it supports CGI, PHP, SSI, FrontPage Extensions, Perl, Python, and mySQL databases, all the technology that I need for my new website. Also, the offer that I chose gave 1GB of storage space on their server, plus 20GB of bandwidth per month, as long as I host one of their adverts on every page that is visible to the public. So much for being free of forced adverts. Anyway, I created my new free account at this particular free webhost that shall remain nameless, and set to uploading my website components. I uploaded the Lanius Content Management System, then phpBB3, then the Truppentool software that I use for troop management in Travian. I configured the mySQL databases for each component, and then backed it all up, before I ran the installation routines for each component, so that I could quickly restore to defaults if I mucked anything up during installation.

 

This proved to be a mistake, as the backup routines in cPanel have a high processor overhead, and my account was suspended immediately for excessive processor activity. A great start to the first day of my new website! By the time my account was unsuspended, I had to log off for the night anyway, so nothing more was done on the site. For the next few days I was busy with work, and only got to spend a little amount of time each day working on the new website. It took me a couple of goes to get phpBB3 running properly, and Lanius took a while to make it look like my own website, rather than just a Lanius mirror site. During even these short periods of working on the new site, the HTTP server was locking up every now and then, and I never achieved as much as I wanted to. It was while I was waiting for one of these outages to be restored that I stumbled upon the fact that I have to get my required host-supplied advertising up within one week of account creation, or they will suspend my account (again) or possibly even delete my account! A quick post on their forums left me with the reply from one of their admins that I will be granted extra time to meet the requirements of the TOS, due to the outages.

 

It turns out that the outages are due to their admins upgrading PHP on their servers to the latest version. This upgrade seemed to take infinitely longer than I thought it would have, and I was still unable to get the required adverts up because the HTTP server was down more often than it was up. remember, I only registered the account on 9-Aug-2008. It is now 17-Aug-2008, and apparently the upgrade is completed. I am at last able to see my web pages on their server.

 

However, that is not the end of it. I can only see whatever pages that I had previously uploaded, and cannot add any new pages, as their hard drive on the server is now overloaded, and there is no spare room left! All FTP uploads fail with an error code 553 Disk full - please upload later. Another message on the webhost's forums, and the admins assure us that this new problem will be resolved shortly. All the while, I still don't know whether my changes to my compnents are going to display the required adverts or not, and if after all this waiting I will not meet the requirements of their TOS and will have my account deleted.

 

So, after all this I am searching again for another webhost for my new MMOG clan website. I see that to gain access to the better hosting package here on Host17.com, I need to gain hosting credits, and that one way to do that is to post meaningful messages on the forums here. The only thing that I could think of posting was a rant about useless webhosts, and Trapped In *BLEEP*! was like a beacon to me. Thank you for allowing me to vent.

[jlhaslip 4]

Sounds like quite an adventure at that nameless hosting service.
I anticipate that your experience here at the Xisto will be better than the other Host. Indeed, there may be a glitch or two now and again, but the Admins work very hard to ensure the uptime is maintained and the sites are "UP" and running.
Good luck with your Postings. and in order to avoid any problems, please read the Xisto Readme file found here .

[travstatesmen 0]

Thank you, jlhaslip, I see that I have gained 10 Hosting Credits already, and could now apply for a Package 1 hosting plan on Host17.com if I wanted to. I gather than your reading my post had something to do with that, so thanks again. I will be going for the Package 2 offer though, so I still have some forum trolling posting to do yet to get to the next level.

 

I will be reading through all the information that you have given me the link for, thanks. I am particularly keen to know such things as the number of mySQL databases available between the different packages offered by Xisto.com, the number of Email accounts, FTP accounts, etc that can be created through cPanel depending on which package I take from Xisto. I don't only look at disk space and bandwidth, as I know there is more to it than that. My previous host limited me to only three mySQL databases, and I hope to find that Xisto allows for more than that. I shall continue reading to find the answers to my questions. Again, thanks for your help and your welcoming me to Xisto.

[Nabb 0]

My stats (so you can know what you get - it's the 30 credits hosting package):

Disk Space Usage 10.8/500 MB
Monthly Bandwidth Transfer
35.24/10240 MB
Email Accounts
4/99
Subdomains
0/99
Parked Domains
0/9
Addon Domains
0/9
Ftp Accounts
0/99
SQL Databases
3/99
Mailing Lists
0/99
Hosting package Beta
Server Name gamma
cPanel Version 11.23.4-RELEASE
cPanel Build 26138
Theme x3
Apache version 1.3.41 (Unix)
PHP version 5.2.5
MySQL version 5.0.51a-community
Architecture i686
Operating system Linux
Shared Ip Address 208.87.243.146
Path to sendmail /usr/sbin/sendmail
Path to PERL /usr/bin/perl
Kernel version 2.6.18-53.1.14.el5
cPanel Pro 1.0 (RC1)

Yes, ninety-nine databases.

Yes, I've used 35MB of bandwidth by myself ;P

(if only I had worded all that text myself, I would have loads of credits ;P)

[Saint_Michael 3]

**gives travstatesmen a big hug** there there. you don't have to worry about going to crappy hosting service ever again and let uncle Xisto take care of you and all your hosting needs.Wow this is got to be the weirdest post I ever made .

[jlhaslip 4]

**gives travstatesmen a big hug** there there. you don't have to worry about going to crappy hosting service ever again and let uncle Xisto take care of you and all your hosting needs.

 

Wow this is got to be the weirdest post I ever made .

to SM: NOT!

 

As you can see, the features are relatively unrestricted here.

 

And I doubt if my reading the post affected your credits. It is strictly based on word count and quality of post, ie: relating the information in the posting to the Topic heading, Spelling, Grammar, etc. And 10 credits is the maximum credits for a single posting.

[Saint_Michael 3]

Thank you, jlhaslip, I see that I have gained 10 Hosting Credits already, and could now apply for a Package 1 hosting plan on Host17.com if I wanted to. I gather than your reading my post had something to do with that, so thanks again. I will be going for the Package 2 offer though, so I still have some forum trolling posting to do yet to get to the next level.

 

I will be reading through all the information that you have given me the link for, thanks. I am particularly keen to know such things as the number of mySQL databases available between the different packages offered by Xisto.com, the number of Email accounts, FTP accounts, etc that can be created through cPanel depending on which package I take from Xisto. I don't only look at disk space and bandwidth, as I know there is more to it than that. My previous host limited me to only three mySQL databases, and I hope to find that Xisto allows for more than that. I shall continue reading to find the answers to my questions. Again, thanks for your help and your welcoming me to Xisto.

As Nabb has posted and haslip reinforcing, you have more then enough for your needs, but want to send out a small caution though as there having been some minor hosting account incidents (bugs) in the last couple of weeks. However, the admin having been making sure to find them and cut them off to prevent them from happening again. So don't be to hastily in leaving for another host if you run into some problems, but if you do https://support.xisto.com/ should be the first place to go and send in a support ticket to get it fix as quickly as possible, and after that check the forums out and see if topics have been made already before posting a new one. However, since your account is brand new you shouldn't be affected to much in down time and stuff like that.

 

either way this is a reliable host and usually when people start breaking the free hosting packages here they usually move on to paid hosting by Xisto - Web Hosting.com.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

Wow, I feel bad for your experiences man. I've been through quite a few web hosts myself trying to find a good one, but most either didn't work properly, lagged out, or something like that.I've always been sure to keep a full backup of my website though just in case something happens and it gets wiped for whatever reason.Trap ended up being one of the last resorts for me and so far it's going pretty well. My only complaint is some issues that I've been having with the SQL servers not working right here. Although this does happen, it's not really that often and it's still significantly better than most of the other hosts that I've been to.

[travstatesmen 0]

Thanks Nabb, that was very useful seeing your account's stats. 99 mySQL databases huh? I don't think even I would need that many! I'm already running three installations of Truppentool in a single mySQL database and they seem to coexist quite happily. I'm sure that once my site starts getting popular thiings may change, but I still don't think I'll use the full 99 databases here!

 

* Hugs Saint_Michael back. * Thanks, I'm sure that uncle Xisto will take good care of me.

 

It is strictly based on word count and quality of post, ie: relating the information in the posting to the Topic heading, Spelling, Grammar, etc.

So, how does the Xisto forum know about "quality of post"? I could copy the Desiderata (first copyrighted in 1927, thus now well out of copyright) and just insert some choice words that match the subject of my thread, if it were a fully automated system. Surely real human beings like yourself have some input?

 

To Saint_Michael and rpgsearcherz, thanks for your words of wisdom and caution. I guess all hosts, free ones especially, have their technical difficulties every now and then. But I am still unable to get much done on my current host, even now. They seem to have resolved the lack of hard drive space problem, but the HTTP server is still going offline all the time, and it seems to be down more often than it is up. I'm forcing myself to add content to my site using the online editor that is part of Lanius CMS, as I expect that this is how my users will mostly be adding content to my site also, and it is a real problem with the HTTP server going down all the time. I can imagine how frustrating that will be for my users. I take a copy of the raw HTML of each page that I create using the Lanius editor, and I use that as a backup on my own computer, so I can easily migrate to a new webhost when that becomes an available option.

 

Speaking of which, I don't intend to earn my 30 Credits here in this one thread, so I'm going to cause some bedlam post in some other threads on the Xisto forum. Again, thanks everybody for your welcome, your advice, and words of comfort.

[jlhaslip 4]

So, how does the Xisto forum know about "quality of post"? I could copy the Desiderata (first copyrighted in 1927, thus now well out of copyright) and just insert some choice words that match the subject of my thread, if it were a fully automated system. Surely real human beings like yourself have some input?

Copy and paste/plagiarism/copying without giving due credit to the original author is not allowed. Credits will be deducted for material found to be non-original.

 

And, yes, the Mods read most posts, too.We have several methods to detect Spam and plagiarised materials.

[Saint_Michael 3]

Yeah no one really ever uses 99 databases, but a smart thing to do travstatesmen is to have separate databases for all your needs. I tell you why, if that database goes down for some strange reason, all that data is down. However, with a separate DB you won't have to worry about that DB going down unless MySQL goes then it doesn't really matter. Xisto has had a few down times when its come to MySQL but usually they are back up quick and sometimes longer, so you might have gotten on some other host with cramming as much as you can in one DB, but I wouldn't recommend here, well I wouldn't recommend it anywhere actually.Think about copyright this way. If your doing a research paper for school and you have to cite your source especially if you use a direct quote. If that quote is like a paragraph long then it needs to be quoted. Basically if you going to quote something longer then a sentence then you need to use quote tags and if its nice and short you don't have do it because it makes no sense. Also the rules of copyright regardless if its from 1927 are still intact, remember that is the year the book got copyrighted meaning you can't claim it as your own as book copyrights are never ending.