OutFront's shopping cart site http://www.frontpagecommerce.com, however, is on a shared NT server. (Formerly IMConline now Vianetworks)

Last week, the asp server was down once, the SQL Server database was down twice, and there are frequent patches of time where the site moves so slowly that it might as well be down.

Do I have a bad host or a bad OS? Or could it be something else?

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Gil Harvey
The Host Factory
Resellers are our speciality
"Is there another word for synonym?"

With shared hosting, every site on the box affects every other site. If there's three guys on the server and one of these guys has decided to learn to program in ASP and decided to get a $10.00/month webhosting account so he can learn ASP, everyone on that box is going to get hurt each time his crappy code is called. He could end up writing an infinite loop that hogs the CPU and eats up all the ram. He could end up opening a million connections to his access database and never closing one of them (screwing over everyone else that uses the access database engine), etc. These are the joys with shared hosting and why if your site is truly mission critical and can justify it you should go with dedicated hosting.

Now with Windows NT, if one site dies it would take the whole box down with it. BAM!GAME OVER time to restart. In Windows 2000, you can run people in what's called medium isolation or pooled. In medium isolation the sites don't run in the same process as IIS, so if the sites crash they force an automatic restart of the pool but the IIS engine keeps ticking along. This is the beauty of IIS5 and one of the reason windows2000 boxes almost never need to be restarted. We used to reboot the NT boxes every week to two weeks. We've gone months on end with the 2000 boxes. Now IIS5 isn't perfect but it's definately a step in the correct direction.

You know when you think about it, how good a server runs really depends on the server administrator. If he sucks at UNIX and hasn't got a clue, that UNIX box is going to be a piece of crap. Same thing goes for Windows, you gotta know how to work the tools to craft the art.

Jess

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Applied Innovations
http://www.appliedi.net/
FrontPage Web Hosting

I agree it's the admin not the OS that makes the difference. And I second the NT -vs- 2000 comparision, 2000 FAR superior to NT. Are you serious about the reboot intervals? At my ISP we hosted less than 100 domains on our NT boxes and could never go more than a week without rebooting and usually less than a week.

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Gil Harvey
The Host Factory
Resellers are our speciality
"Is there another word for synonym?"

Tom...did you see (more) problems after Vianetworks took over?

This has happened to me a few times......Good host...all is well....new (big) company takes over....accountants fire half of the staff in a "cost reduction" program and... BANG!....Your site is suffering!

Rian

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Webmaster
SR Web Creators
http://www.srwebcreators.com
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"Press ENTER once to quit or twice to save changes..."
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quote:

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Originally posted by Gil:
Great post Jess

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quote:

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I agree it's the admin not the OS that makes the difference. And I second the NT -vs- 2000 comparision, 2000 FAR superior to NT. Are you serious about the reboot intervals? At my ISP we hosted less than 100 domains on our NT boxes and could never go more than a week without rebooting and usually less than a week.

[/B]

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Oh yeah! We would routinely reboot the boxes just to be safe, even if we didn't need to. Now with W2K you don't have to do that. But If you do need to reset IIS, go to dos and type: iisreset. Only time we need to do this is if someone acts up and has too many access database connections open or happens to have a memory leak, etc. We had an example not too long ago where we went in and rebooted the box. It was online almost 100 days solid prior to the reboot and we honestly hated that we had to reboot it but we were installing a hotfix.

Now, stability is not the only advantage we've seen. The performance is far far above and beyond that of IIS4. In fact in IIS5 if you're just serving static HTML pages on your virtual servers you can really pack 'em in. In NT it was common to find boxes with 250-350 virtual servers and they would be maxed out at that point, with W2K we're told it's common to see them in the thousands (Although we run a strong mix of ASP in there so we still keep it in the 250-350 range for performance).

If you haven't gone W2K, do and you'll never look back. Personally, I wouldn't do a NT to W2K upgrade, I would just move accounts from NT to a fresh W2K install but that's just me.

Regards,
Jess

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Applied Innovations
http://www.appliedi.net/
FrontPage Web Hosting

I enjoyed your post. I also thought I recognized your name and looked through some old emails and found it. I put up a web site on your servers a few months ago for a client. He ended up going to a different host for several reasons, none of which made sense to me. I advised him to stay, but...

I would like to say that your site ran FAST. Very fast compared to some of the other shared servers that I have worked with.

Good show.

Joe

Support, when we needed it was excellent and the speed was good.

Anyway, I am kinda wondering why with all this talk about which OS to use, you all decide to use a program like FrontPage to do your websites with. I might just have bad luck with frontpage extensions and such, but it seems like there is a serious stability problem with it. You MUST do stuff exactly or else you have to start over.

Not trying to start anything.... just making remarks.

John

Although, I don't really use FP for much anymore except publishing and site management.

quote:

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Originally posted by RamTech:
resources. PCAnywhere is faster going to our co-located server running NT than it is going to our internal 2000 machine. It is not the network, because we also have an NT machine internal... it is the OS...

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John, install terminal services on your 2000 box in remote administration mode. It allows you to have a two user license FOR FREE!.

You'll never look at pcNOwhere the same way again (friggin thing still sucks..)

I have dedicated clients that were complaining about pcnowhere too and said they preferred VNC. I turned them onto terminal services and they love. I connect at 28.8 from home (yeah sucks) and use only terminal services anymore. It's almost like sitting in front of the box is so blazing fast.

Jess

quote:

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Originally posted by JessCoburn:

It's almost like sitting in front of the box is so blazing fast.

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Ditto - after living with PCanywhere for years, I feel like being "reborn" using terminal services!!

quote:

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John you said "You MUST do stuff exactly or else you have to start over."

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Well, yeah - Are you saying there's something wrong with this?

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Gil Harvey
The Host Factory
Resellers are our speciality
"Is there another word for synonym?"