View Full Version : Not sure where to go with this: bandwith limits, etc.
I am not completely certain where to take this inquiry so I have opted to ask a multitude of persons by placing this here. If this particular issue goes against some policy I apologize and hold nothing against you for removing it promptly. However, if it does not then please, hear me out.
This is coming from a view of someone who is not a hosted customer of Pow Web. I am a guest merely visiting because a website I frequent (on a near daily basis) has been having issues and so there's this lovely little button leading me here to you fine folks. At first, the message stating that the website had exceeded the 5gb limit sometime after I had left it around 11PM MST (or 10PM PST) was not so far fetched. A peak hour time had hit and people were most likely sending in requests by the hundreds. So. I waited. All day long. I waited for it to reappear and only found myself bristled with relief when I had found the website reactivated at 1AM MST this morning. Glorius; no big deal! Probably a one time fluke. So I go about my business, it's early so not many people are awake so there shouldn't be any problems again for a while, right? No. Just under two hours later I come back to check up on something and find the 5gb exceeded message lurking instead of the page expected. This has become irritating. And I know for a fact that there is no possible way in such a low activity time like 2AM MST that any website that has primarily USA hits is going to go over 5gb! It doesn't make any logical sense.
After the first bout of downtime I had come here, perusing your forums to find if there were possible problems with the main server. However I saw nothing that would lead me to believe that this was a major outage. Mostly, I’ve seen posts in regards to the recent restrictions on hit counts. I wonder, do you (the staff of pow web) use the same page for websites that have exceeded the hit count as you do for ones who exceed the bandwidth usage? That would be a little more believable, rather improbable but believable. (Because again the question becomes how a website could obtain half a million hits in 2 non-peak hours.)
I could nag the hostess of the website with an annoying e-mail or even offer her assistance in paying for a dedicated server (which I am heavily considering.) but I do not feel that the blame lies on her. This website has been running well and smoothly up until the past two days. Now, suddenly for no reason (or what seems to be no reason) there are problems. So, as a concerned customer of a customer, I’d like someone to look into this.
Are there some answers for me out there? Could someone explain how it might be possible for a website to exceed 5gb in under 2 hours of uptime? :confused:
Between the new PowWeb load-balancing scheme screwing up existing, established, software, and the multitude of new limits that are being imposed, combined with the story of the gentleman who ended up in PowWeb's "abuse" black hole because of the local Los Angeles media focus on the subject of his website (weather!), I have decided this past weekend to implement my own "load-balancing" scheme.
I now have a live-backup site at a second ISP where I have moved some of my subdomains, and put corresponding CNAME entries in PowWeb's DNS to point these subdomains of the same domain name to the IP address of the webserver hosting these subdomains. Works like a dream!
For special maintenance needs where I have to access the domain name (not subdomains, or FTP) at the load-balanced secondary ISP site, I just put a temporary entry in my PC's host table with the secondary IP address.
I think ISP "load-balancing" is the solution to my needs.
Thank you for your reply, jorgfe.
I could see how that would work, redirecting your current websites to other hosts. (especially in regards to bandwith usage) However, that sounds a little redundant. Why pay for a service if you aren't even going to use it for anything but redirecting to other servers? Sure, it keeps you within Pow Web's limitations for the time being but every one of those redirects calls in a request, too, so you're still racking up the hits.
*shrugs* maybe I'm not getting something, but I don't see the point in paying for a service that's only half recieved.
And I still don't see how it's possible for a website, especially one that is primarily text, to reach these so called limitations in under 2 hours of uptime. I've run websites of my own before and never had these sorts of issues, it seems to me like there's a problem in the system.
There's a noticable lag-time between an average user's clock and the one Pow Web's servers use. (ie. Websites are supposed to be back and viewable at Midnight PST, or 1AM MST, my time zone, but it wasn't until 1:15AM that the page was viewable. It went back down around 2:11AM.) Also, from what I've seen based on other's comments, a noticeable difference in their log figures and the figures given to them by Pow Web. I don't think that the host is trying to create problems, don't get me wrong, but this is more than just coincidence in my mind.
I'm concerend for the hostess of the website I go to because she pays good money for the service and probably doesn't have time to deal with this constantly. I wouldn't blame her if she just shut it down from the sheer irritation. However, I really appreciate the services her website offers and it bothers me to think that it could be gone simply because of some off-kilter hosting.
I know for a fact that there is no possible way in such a low activity time like 2AM MST that any web site that has primarily USA hits is going to go over 5gb!You cannot state, "for a fact," anything about a given web site's traffic unless you happen to own the site, or are privy to the site's logs or usage statistics.
That you are a newly registered user posting long, critical messages in a web host's forum about bandwidth limitations that are affecting a site that you (ostensibly) do not own, not to mention the fact that you did not first contact the site owner, and have not provided any specific information about the site in question, is curious to say the least.
I'm sorry you feel that I'm overstepping my bounds or making "curious" actions.
However, 5gb is a huge amount and to overthrow that in two hours would take an insane amount of traffic. I don't even think there are that many users that go to the website that I'm referring to. The reason I don't give details is because that's not the point of this message, I am merely wondering why something like this could happen. I am not here to shove the particular website into the spotlight. And I never did anything ostensibly, I never made it a hidden factor that I do NOT own the website in particular and that I was merely a guest. I also did not try to hide the fact that I am a new poster to this particular forum. Also, I did not once state that I had not contacted the website owner on the issue at hand. I merely said that I would not nag them about it as I believe it is not their fault.
Whatever you may believe about me you are free to believe it, I care not, but please do not make statements towards my character which are false just because you do not understand my motives.
I am trying my best not to be critical, and I apologize if it has come across that way. I never meant to make anyone defensive.
I think that in order to have a meaningful discussion of this case, we would need to be privy to what was in the access log of the site in question. This would help answer many of the questions. Only the site owner could legitimately request assistance with this if she is unfamiliar with how to look at and understand the access log.
I think that in order to have a meaningful discussion of this case, we would need to be privy to what was in the access log of the site in question. This would help answer many of the questions. Only the site owner could legitimately request assistance with this if she is unfamiliar with how to look at and understand the access log.
You mean you want the facts so we can have a discussion based on something other than the hypothetical and wild speculation? What would be the fun in that? :rolleyes:
Once you reach 25000 requests in one hour your already shut down for the rest of the day. Its not 500000 for the whole day.
Thank you for your reply, jorgfe.
I could see how that would work, redirecting your current websites to other hosts. (especially in regards to bandwith usage) However, that sounds a little redundant. Why pay for a service if you aren't even going to use it for anything but redirecting to other servers? Sure, it keeps you within Pow Web's limitations for the time being but every one of those redirects calls in a request, too, so you're still racking up the hits.
*shrugs* maybe I'm not getting something, but I don't see the point in paying for a service that's only half recieved.
And I still don't see how it's possible for a website, especially one that is primarily text, to reach these so called limitations in under 2 hours of uptime. I've run websites of my own before and never had these sorts of issues, it seems to me like there's a problem in the system.
There's a noticable lag-time between an average user's clock and the one Pow Web's servers use. (ie. Websites are supposed to be back and viewable at Midnight PST, or 1AM MST, my time zone, but it wasn't until 1:15AM that the page was viewable. It went back down around 2:11AM.) Also, from what I've seen based on other's comments, a noticeable difference in their log figures and the figures given to them by Pow Web. I don't think that the host is trying to create problems, don't get me wrong, but this is more than just coincidence in my mind.
I'm concerend for the hostess of the website I go to because she pays good money for the service and probably doesn't have time to deal with this constantly. I wouldn't blame her if she just shut it down from the sheer irritation. However, I really appreciate the services her website offers and it bothers me to think that it could be gone simply because of some off-kilter hosting.
Actually it doesn't rack up any hits, since it looks at the DNS one time for the browser session and immediately goes to the secondary ISP. It never even gets to my primary webserver in the first place.
If I didn't host with PowWeb I wouldn't understand a lot of the things that have been discussed here in the last two months.
I am hosting quite a number of websites with PowWeb, both directly under my name and also under three other accounts. I have been with PowWeb for quite some time and was very impressed with both their service and the stability that my applications have experienced in their hosting environment.
The first rude awakening was about a year ago when, without notice, they implemented a significant mod_rewrite change to the way they handle subdomains, and blew all my subdomains on the various websites out of the water. Only when the volunteer moderators started getting really vocal trying to figure out what was going on themselves, did the technical support come clean about what they had done. Even then they took the position that it is better to make a change, and then answer questions after wards. You can probably still read the posts. It took me about two months to get my various subdomains all straightened out. Having worked in the computer field for 27 years I am not a novice at this.
I chalked that up as a one-time learning experience for both me and PowWeb and hoped it wouldn't happen again. PowWeb likes to talk about hardware uptime. What matters to me, and everyone else that hosts with PowWeb is application uptime.
All was going well, and then they decided to baptize us all at the same time to the notion of "load-balancing". I would have thought it would have made a lot more sense to try it with just two web servers, and get the wrinkles worked out instead of just doing it to all of us at the same time. That has had an affect. But up to this point I have been committed to staying with PowWeb, and hoping there aren't any more major surprises.
Just when we are barely recovering from all the trama of January and February, they start announcing all these new limits. It's really getting ridiculous. Between that and all the problems that people have had with getting any kind of timely response from "abuse@powweb.com", I have decided to take out some insurance of my own and do some "ISP load-balancing". As currently configured, I immediately have a "load-balancing" alternative for any of my PowWeb-hosted sites.
Who knows, if PowWeb gets their act together, stops threatening us, stops BSing us about 100% uptime, and makes the ride pleasurable I will stay. Two bee stings are painful, three are enough.
Some small things that would make PowWeb much more enjoyable at this point are:
1. Change the 5-minute FTP timeout to 15 minutes. My backup ISP is Globat.com, and they have a 15 minute timeout. Sometimes it's hard to edit a file, and load it back up in 5 minutes. I find little things like this are a big annoyance for me.
2. Drop the daily limit for both bandwith and transactions, then no one has any excuse for the local news media highlighting their site and the PowWeb taking them off the air for too much activity in a 24-hour period. Keep the monthly limits in place. If someone gets spiked on a given day, then they have plenty of time to throttle back. Globat gives 5GB disk and 75GB per month. PowWeb gives 2GB disk and 150GB per month. Sounds comparable to me. My largest website actually takes 300 MB of disk and doesn't have a whopping amount of traffic anyway.
3. Provide us with some way to conveniently restore databases with more than 72,000 records per hour. We aren't going to do that every day anyway.
4. Eliminate the 30,000 file limit. Most other ISP don't have this. I had only about 21,000 files according to quota on one website, and I was still getting file limit reached messages when I was trying to work out a PostNuke install because of a well-know problem that PowWeb has with inaccessible open session files that don't expire in a timely way.
5. Restore email support for purchased domain pointers (alternate domain names pointing to the same site). They recently took this away. They charge $20 to add a domain pointer. Is it really going to hurt them that much to add, say up to 5 email addresses for the purchased alternate domain pointer to an existing website? I really don't understand their logic.
I think these five items would eliminate 95% of the complaints.
I personally don't think they need to preinstall software for us like they were proposing in a recent poll. That opens up a whole "can of worms" they aren't prepared to address. Focus on their core competencies, and 99% customer application uptime.
I really do like PowWeb. They have a very nice Control Panel, daily database backups, DNS support. Load-balancing is a good idea, and I am willing to rewrite the few programs, such as PostNuke RSS that are affected by this. I could provide quite a long list of things I like about PowWeb, with these forums being at the top, and if this latest craziness stops, I will. PowWeb and LunarPages are the only big ISPs with support forums, and LunarPages only gives you one measley mySQL database!
I have had lots of enjoyable times setting things up in PowWeb's environment. I would like to stay with them. If they stop the threats, and all the new limits, I will.
I was pleased as punch with PowWeb when I signed up. However, my site has been dog slow since we began the whole load-balancing run through the crapper. I also found out yesterday that I wasn't receiving my order status emails from a few companies because I started doing RBL checking, blacklisting and greylisting on my domain. I would have liked to have been given the option to opt-in rather than out, but at least now I know what's happening.
I guess I just need to start checking the PowWeb forums daily for all these surprises. Gone are the days when I liked PowWeb because it simply worked, quickly and reliably. I'll be here until the next best thing comes along. I liked PowWeb for most of my time here, but it has gotten a little ridiculous of late. If you have the problems, you understand. If you don't, be thankful. If you feel combative, that's fine too, but I probably won't have much of a response for you. If you need a gmail invitation because you find your PowWeb email is no longer worth using for mail you actually want to receive, let me know and I'll send you one. I have 50 per day to give away. Still, I miss actually using my own domain name in my email address.. I also miss broadband, when I could do my own hosting and not have to constantly check that things were still working. The joys of building a home in the woods near a town serviced by a cable company too bankrupt to do proper buildouts..
The point is this: If you have a website with a purpose more worthwhile than mine and are considering signing up with a new hosting provider, keep shopping around unless your content is mostly static HTML and you don't mind it taking a while to load in a browser. I am a paying customer and I feel obligated to share for anyone looking for a service I no longer feel I receive here. With all the new limits, slowness, and unannounced base functionality changes/breakages, I'm saddened at seeing all the reasons why I chose Powweb over everyone else diminish.
You said it so eloquently! I couldn't say it any better. Thankyou!
The PowWeb "honeymoon" the last two years was very nice (with the exception of the unannounced subdomain change). I set up quite a number of PowWeb accounts and recommended them to all my friends. Sadly, the PowWeb of 2005 is a totally different company.
Application stability in a PowWeb environment seems to be relegated to the historical trashbin. Instead of their testing things like load-balancing offline before dragging us all through the muck, we are now their testbed. I am stunned by their pat answers, of in essence, "It's your problem. We recommend that you rewrite your programs."
If that is not enough, to add insult to injury, they start producing new thresholds to send more of us into abuse@powweb-hell.com. Read the stories here. My heart goes out for anyone who is unfortunate to find themself languishing there for days -- trying to get someone at PowWeb to respond with more than their canned emails.
And the 5-minute FTP timeout is my personal pet peeve, and constant irritant. I can't hardly download. edit, and upload a config file before it times out!. At least change it to 15 minutes, instead of sending me an FTP message, "You need to type faster."
Their 72,000 record SQL upload limit is another whenever I try to help my friends upload a large database to one of their sites.
There are three other big fish in the same pond:
<<host removed>>
PowWeb needs to show us why PowWeb should be #1 in this pond. At this point these forums are the main reason.
cyberCrank
3-11-05, 04:42 PM
OK Z-girl -- your posting strikes a cord and resonates with me and apparently with others who are paying customers of Powweb (I consider myself not only a paying customer, but a loyal customer "so far", but that is as far as I will go at the moment). I also gave you reputation points (+2) for your respectful posts and feel they are "possibly" credible and legit (note the emphasis on "possibly", but don't dwell on it because it is only an outlet for me due to my own ignorance of all of the so called "facts", but ignorance is nothing to be ashamed of because everyone is ignorant of some things by shear definition and our finite capacities...). But I like what you posted in general (although I do not agree with everything you say) and feel that it was postured well in a considerate way and was respectful (assuming it is credible and legit, which I assume until proved otherwise).
First off I agree "partly" with mjp, but not totally with his apparently biased response and accusations. I agree partly with mjp in that you do not know this as fact:
And I know for a fact that there is no possible way in such a low activity time like 2AM MST that any website that has primarily USA hits is going to go over 5gb! It doesn't make any logical sense.
There are indeed "ways" that this "could" happen, but I would speculate and mostly would agree with you that it be very "unlikely". We also learn, as you note, that not all "error messages" actually represent the true cause-and-effect relationship and should always be viewed as "guidance" and not as fact or the "truth". Even when we customers want to assess usage in the OPS pages, which do not agree with the hourly and daily logs completely, they can become or appear to be misleading and are themselves suspect at times and contrary to helping establish true cause-and-effect relations let alone to establish "facts" as could or would be used in scientific research and/or courts of law. But even then one's "facts" are often viewed by some as simply ostensible observations subject to interpretation and perception within our own personal biases as we are all victims of the Pygmalion effect...
But in general, your posts resonate strongly with many, and your concerns are shared with many of my friends.
You cannot state, "for a fact," anything about a given web site's traffic unless you happen to own the site, or are privy to the site's logs or usage statistics.
That you are a newly registered user posting long, critical messages in a web host's forum about bandwidth limitations that are affecting a site that you (ostensibly) do not own, not to mention the fact that you did not first contact the site owner, and have not provided any specific information about the site in question, is curious to say the least.
I would equally argue (in earnest yet respectfully) that the part in bold is extrapolation and speculation and not fact at all and stoops to a level less than professional. I would also argue that this post, by an PW staffer, seems to be "accusational", defensive, and questioning the poster's motives before hearing them out. Powweb has blamed even their own customers when things have been changed by Powweb and customer sites break, when Powweb changed things and caused site problems and it has happened more than once.
------------
In addition to Z-girl -- reputation points to you guys for posting and your posts resonating with me and surely with many others on the "principles":
jorgfe++
Ochiba++
All was going well, and then they decided to baptize us all at the same time to the notion of "load-balancing".
Maybe perceived by some as a good "Baptist dunking" while they were inhaling ;)
Respectfully,
cyberCrank
** I also predict this thread to be short lived... **
mprovost
3-11-05, 09:54 PM
I just raised the FTP idle timeout to 15 minutes on all the FTP servers.
I just raised the FTP idle timeout to 15 minutes on all the FTP servers.
Wow! You are wonderful! I don't know how to thank you enough. This is a wonderful move that is sure to get positive praise from just about everyone!
The 5-minute FTP time out was a royal pain. Wednesday night I helped a lady from these forums reload a 320,000 record database, and get her site back up. With the 72,000 record mySQL limit per hour (which I can live with if there is not a better way) there was a lot of FTP work. It went on most of the night, and part of next morning. Everytime I stopped to edit a file on my PC from her site, FTP would time out. Like BB&T, I love the community here and just enjoy helping others.
This upgrade to 15 minutes on the FTP timeout is the best thing that has happened in a long time, and something that DID affect me personally. Lots!
PowWeb -- you have earned back at least 50% of the points you lost over the load-balancing problems, subdomain reworking, etc. I knew I made the right choice to go with PowWeb. There IS a God in heaven that hears our prayers!
Everyone. We've complained enough. We need to be sure and let PowWeb know they did this one right!
TrashTrampoline
3-11-05, 11:34 PM
I just raised the FTP idle timeout to 15 minutes on all the FTP servers.
That is very cool, I didn't dig the 5 minutes either, but just accepted it.
Thanks!
cyberCrank
3-12-05, 02:15 AM
I just raised the FTP idle timeout to 15 minutes on all the FTP servers.mprovost++
Powweb++
Thanks!
Getting back to the original question for a minute, correct me if I'm wrong, but once you've been shut down for going over your allotted bandwidth, I don't think your slate gets wiped clean. You don't actually get 5gb per day, but rather 5gb for any 24-hour period. So say 4 of the 5gb was transferred between 5pm and 10pm, when the site was shut down. It went back up at 12, but it would have only had 1gb of bandwidth left for up until 5pm the next day. So no matter what the actual numbers were, it is possible to be shut down again soon after you're reactivated, depending on the time at which the majority of the transfers took place.
This is based on the fact that my site was once shut down within 15 minutes of being reactivated. Rather frustrating. It may have been a Powweb error though, because I emailed them about it and my site was back up when I checked in the morning.
As for your question about time, I just checked the Powweb server against timeanddate.com, and they're exactly the same. I think the actual problem is that they don't run the reactivation process until about 12:15, because that's when my site has come back as well the few times it's been disabled.
I would equally argue (in earnest yet respectfully) that the part in bold ("not to mention the fact that you did not first contact the site owner") is extrapolation and speculation and not fact at all and stoops to a level less than professional.Anything other than a direct quote can be called extrapolation, so you've got me there. But it certainly wasn't speculation. Z-girl stated in the first post, "I could nag the hostess of the web site with an annoying e-mail...but I do not feel that the blame lies on her." "another annoying e-mail" would lead one to assume prior contact. "an annoying e-mail" implies that there has been no prior contact. So saying that they did not contact the owner is not speculation, it's merely a rewording of, or extrapolation from, if you prefer, what Z-girl stated.
I characterized the posts as "curious" based on many years of experience in forums, and before forums existed, on usenet, where stirring up trouble was elevated to an art form, and where people who would come out of nowhere into a group and start making wild accusations were labeled "trolls." While I certainly stopped short of any such labeling, that history and experience is what my "curious" remark was based on. It wasn't a value judgment, it was an observation.
If I'm the only one who finds the posts questionable (which would surprise me, but hey, it wouldn't be the first time I was wrong), I'll apologize and bow out.
R.Reinhardt
3-15-05, 07:04 AM
Hey, look at this...
Last night www.deadlikemeonline.com was taken down for the exact same reason. It exceeded 5gig in under 2 hours as well. When I opened up my webstats, this is what I found in the robot/spider section...
WebReaper 115323 5.78 GB 14 Mar 2005 - 19:14
So, I guess my question is this. Are we to be penialized by powweb because (we) went over our daily bandwidth because of someone elses robot? My site was down for almost 6 hours because of this dang thing... So, suggestions would be great at this point... I don't want to see this thing back...
R.Reinhardt
3-15-05, 07:37 AM
Actually, what I posted above is MTD robot activity for the site... Got confused there..
But still, what the heck happened? I know I don't have that much useage on my site to warrant that much bandwidth... My daily average is like 830 MB?
So confused! ARG!!!
NeilFawcett
3-15-05, 09:15 AM
I just raised the FTP idle timeout to 15 minutes on all the FTP servers.
When I FTP into my sites (on io & mercury) my FTP client (WSFTP) displays a message:-
220 You will be disconnected after 3 minutes of inactivity. :confused:
When I FTP into my sites (on io & mercury) my FTP client (WSFTP) displays a message:-
220 You will be disconnected after 3 minutes of inactivity. :confused:
Could this be a setting within the client. The setting had been 5 mins so 3 doesn't make sense otherwise.
NeilFawcett
3-15-05, 09:33 AM
Could this be a setting within the client. The setting had been 5 mins so 3 doesn't make sense otherwise.
If I FTP into a different server (nothing to do with PowWeb) I get no such message!?
If I'm the only one who finds the posts questionable (which would surprise me, but hey, it wouldn't be the first time I was wrong), I'll apologize and bow out.
Count me in.
If I'm the only one who finds the posts questionable
I felt curious, too.
If a cab you took stalls, you should talk to the cab driver to know what's going on.
Asking the same question to the car manifacture without first asking the driver doesn't make sense to me.
So, I guess my question is this. Are we to be penialized by powweb because (we) went over our daily bandwidth because of someone elses robot?Well, it isn't really a question of being penalized, a limit is a limit, not a penalty. Traffic to your site counts against the limit no matter where it comes from. Having said that, there are ways to prevent some spidering of your site. Do a search here for robots.txt and you'll find a lot of information.
robwillmann
4-1-05, 05:20 AM
First of all, most web harvesters, and email harvesters that are on the shady side don't even bother looking at the robots.txt file.
The robot.txt file is a good way to give rules to the legit bots, like Google, yahoo, etc.
Better is to do a google search for webbots that are KNOWN to be malicious, and use .htaccess to limit them.
Here's a good article by Loran that describes how to limit webbots from leeching traffic:
http://linux.oldcrank.com/tips/antibot/
Maybe that will help reduce bandwidth leeching.
:)
Rob
linnetwoods
4-1-05, 08:21 AM
Well! I learn something every day and on some days I learn two things... I didn't know there was a limit to the number of files one could have, for a start!
By web harvester, I take it you are referring to one of those programs that goes to a given URL and, basically by acting like a vaccuum cleaner, makes a copy of the entire website it finds there, with links re-created to make it a working site offline?
Is there nothing that can stop such a thing happening automatically, at server level, unless the website owner has issued a permission with password or something?
cyberCrank
4-2-05, 11:39 AM
linnetwoods -- by "harvesting" some often mean that spammers "harvest" email addresses from sites to use in their spamming machines or to sell outright. Their harvesters go from "tree to tree" (site to site) harvesting email addresses just like one would harvest fruit from a tree or vegetables from a garden. Quite often the spam harvesters gather the "fruit" from "seeds" we plant on the Internet; so in part we are often guilty of seeding the information for the harvesters to "reap what we sow" and we can help to mitigate this problem in a number of ways.
This is an interesting related read:
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/spamalrt.htm
linnetwoods
4-2-05, 05:41 PM
Eek! Fascinating but terrifying, cyberCrank. Thanks for the link to that article, though. My education is coming on apace now that I have taken to hanging about the corridors of PowWeb instead of spending the proper amount of time improving my websites...
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