Help choosing a new host! Are there any reliable uptime or speed metrics?
 

I am looking for a new host after a series of downtimes from Hostgator.

I've read enough to decide that I should avoid EIG hosts and typical "top 10" lists, but I haven't really figured out how to pick a host. I am also trying to decide if I should pay more for enterprise/semi-dedicated.

I have a simple Wordpress site. The most bandwidth in a month so far was 32 GB, but hopefully growing; 1.5-9k views per day. Space is well under 1 GB so far. Site is mainly for US visitors.

Top Priorities:
1) uptime
2) speed
3) fast/competent response when something breaks

I haven't really found resources that quantify these issues so I would appreciate any guidance.

For example, I see some of the enterprise plans offer a 99.99% uptime guarantee, but as I learned with Hostgator, uptime guarantees are not very valuable. (Having my site down for a couple hours at a peak time can cost me revenue that could have paid for many months of hosting.)

Hi simonsez, and welcome to the site. :)

Yes, Hostgator is now a horrible host -- just another EIG brand. The migration ("upgrade") to Utah was the last nail in the coffin on that deal. The only thing left is (maybe) some employees from the old HG, and the cartoon alligator mascot. Sad to see it end that way. The Borg EIG has assimilated it.

Definitely avoid all EIG brands ... which can be hard to track! (Wikipedia is missing many, and some on that list are NOT correct!) We'll be creating our own list shortly, with verifiable information. There's almost 60 brands now, as they bought several more this year, as recently as last month!

Enough of that... on to your needs...

1500 to 9000 viewers per days is more than shared hosting should be used for. It's more than most will allow. Most hosts will suspend you with that kind of usage, due to resource overuse, as that's not what shared hosting is for. That's a popular site (congratulations!) and it needs adequate resources to run properly -- AND not harm others on a server due to hogging the server resources.

If it was "fine" on Hostgator servers, understand that they're horrible at managing customers. Ever wondered why servers are slow, or down completely? It's because (1) the servers are overloaded, and (2) they don't properly manage it -- i.e, letting a person or two ruin it for everybody else.

So you've got two choices: VPS or semi-dedicated.
- VPS can be superior, as you can select your own server settings and caches, but there's a steep learning curve.
- Semi-dedicated is like shared hosting on steroids. It's a beefier plan, intended for larger sites.

The semi-dedicated (enterprise) plans from Stablehost are excellent. Same for the semi-dedicated plans from MDD Hosting. Those are the two hosts that we suggest most for semi-dedicated. While shared servers have hundreds or thousands of customers each, semi-dedicated servers have a few dozen at most.

The two hosts are excellent in terms of server speeds, support effectiveness (not just speed) and server uptime. My Stablehost servers (a shared, and a VPS) are 100% up most months. In 4 years, it's been down maybe 5 times. In fact, I can't even remember the last time it was down, and would have to check my logs. I keep DETAILED logs of servers, and they're checked every 3-10 minutes, depending on the monitor (there are 3x+ monitors in use).

You've come to realize that guarantees and SLAs are meaningless. Congrats on seeing the light there. What you need to worry about is the actual uptime, not the promises. All the "guarantees" do is throw a few dollars at you, if that. It doesn't solve the problem, and it doesn't make up for it.

If you have more question, just ask. :)

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I did want to point out a few things though.

I recently had a 10k pageview day on my shared Hostgator account, and even at peak times it handled it just fine. They have a CPU monitor in the cPanel, and I did not even go into the "high" usage at peak times. Now, on a previous high traffic day I had some site issues, and I figured out the problem was that I did not have Wordpress caching setup properly. So if you don't use caching, the limits you mentioned seem right, but with caching it seems that you could easily have significantly over 10k pageviews per day.

I also looked at Stablehost Enterprise, and they say it has 100 accounts per server, not dozens. MDD does not seem to list accounts per server for their plans.

Semi-dedicated resources really depend on the server in use. Bigger server = more accounts per.

Well, let's get some terms settled. "Viewers" (uniques) are people. Pageviews is something else. Let's say you have 3,000 viewers daily reading 3 pages each. That's 3k per day

10k uniques daily was definitely too much for shared hosting.

3k per day is 3x30 = 90k per month. Honestly, that's still to high for shared hosting, unless it's a larger account. At most hosts, that's something that's "business", "enterprise" or (using the correct jargon/lingo) semi-dedicated. "Dedicated" because it's not virtualized (VPS), and "semi" because it's still shared.

If they're letting you get away with that, I can assure you it's only temporary on their part. Such usage would hog the resources of the entire server. Hostgator is pretty lousy when it comes to finding abuse, so this comes as no surprise to me. But eventually, they will find the account and suspend it. You'd then be upsold to their subpar VPS and dedicated plans. Happens all the time.

And the limits I gave WERE with caching. An uncached site would heavily abuse the server.

My advice is to move before it's too late. You're pressing you luck here.

To clarify, the numbers in both of my posts are pageviews per day, not "viewers," or "uniques." I do have a few 100k pageview months. What I was trying to say is that even during the peak traffic times, now that I've sorted out the caching, my CPU usage has been low. If I remember correctly, they like you to keep CPU usage below 15%, and mine is usually 0-3%. I could be wrong, but my understanding was that CPU is the main limiting factor. It could also be that I have a relatively lightweight site.

CPU is just one resource. RAM is the one that gets used most by WordPress. And then depending on content, it can adversely affect I/O as well.

Hostgator has migrated most servers to the EIG-owned datacenters, and those accounts are liekly on the not-better "BetterLinux" OS that heavily throttles accounts. You site load times should be under 1s, 2s at very most, when cached. If it's longer, you likely have various throtting (I.O wait, for example) that significantly increases load time. The time to first byte is one of the most visible ones. The server doesn't even respond to for 1-2 seconds, before it starts to load the page. And at EIG hosting brands, it's very common.