FoggyLog

Tue Dec 15th 2009 18:01:00: Streamline.net Review

When I first setup fogma.co.uk it was just a small website and I had many good years of hosting by Purplecloud. Their pricing was excellent and the support was superb - they really knew what they were talking about. I also hosted ghd-repair.co.uk with them. Unfortuantely Purplecloud did suffer from some down time and about two years ago they had a big network failure that took them offline for an entire afternoon. Seeing as ghd-repair.co.uk includes an online shop this obviously lost a number of orders and so I decided it was time to upgrade my hosting to something a bit more expensive in the hope I'd get better reliability.

Therefore I got a bulk hosting package from Streamline.net for about £100 per year and moved both websites. I soon discovered that Streamline's support was poor. They didn't really know the answers to my technical questions (normally related to quirky server setup) and I ended up having to solve the problems with the aid of google. Then at the beginning of this year I started having problems with their server. The support ticket at the time went like this:

Date: 09/01/2009 19:08:49Ticket Number: 400092

Hi,

I seem to be getting fairly regular Internal Server Errors. Looking at my error log, the error is:

[Fri Jan 9 19:00:36 2009] [error] [client 86.26.51.212] FastCGI: comm with (dynamic) server "/var/www/fcgi/php-cgi" aborted: (first read) idle timeout (30 sec)
[Fri Jan 9 19:00:36 2009] [error] [client 86.26.51.212] FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server "/var/www/fcgi/php-cgi"

I've also been experiencing one off 404 errors, despite the fact that I know the page is there. Requesting the page a second time (by pressing refresh in the browser) successfully displays the page.

Do you have any suggestions what might be causing these problems?

Many thanks,

Gary

Their support staff blamed the problem on their mysql server: "This may be an issue with mySQL14 which we are aware of and working to resolve. Our spologies for any inconvenience this causes."

But alas the problem never went away:

Date: 18/05/2009 11:07:51Ticket Number: 400092

Hi,

This error is still happening pretty often to both myself and my site visitors. Please could you investigate further?

Here is a sample of the error log:

[Sun May 17 15:23:02 2009] [error] [client 82.94.176.144] FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server "/var/www/fcgi/php-cgi"
[Sun May 17 15:23:05 2009] [error] [client 92.13.142.4] FastCGI: comm with (dynamic) server "/var/www/fcgi/php-cgi" aborted: (first read) idle timeout (30 sec)
etc...

The reply I got back basically said that this was because the server was shared and there was nothing they could do about it.

By this time my online shop would take about 20 seconds to return a page and my sales were well down. My tests showed that the problem was caused by the MySQL server being very slow. Therefore I moved ghd-repair.co.uk to 34SP and everything started working again. Seeing as there was not much database usage on fogma.co.uk I didn't bother moving that until my year ended with Streamline.

At the beginning of December Streamline tried to charge my credit card for another year of hosting. They didn't warn me about this which was pretty annoying, however fortunately the card details they had on record for me had expired. When they couldn't charge me they disabled FTP access and control panel access until I paid them. I explained that I didn't intend to renew and please would they temporarily renable access so that I could extract my files and settings. True to form they refused - unhelpful to the last!

So my webhost advice is:

• Purplecloud - great for small cheap websites
• Streamline - Don't touch with a bargepole. Terrible hosting and unhelpful support
• 34SP - Excellent. Fast servers and helpful support

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