Dont delete this Herk, it's actually quite enthralling. I liken it to Days Of Our (Hosting) Lives or General Hosting. I'm just waiting to find out who REALLY killed the MySQL DB .

Seriously tho, I don't think that Surpass Hosting can get any higher praise that from the XOOPS big guy himself.

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My interest has been piqued as I have "kept my feelers out" for a reputable host to replace my current one (Globalhosting.com). I am not too happy with what I get (for what I pay). I am currently on a shared hosting plan here (Global Pro). I've been actually quite happy with the support, but it seems to me that in terms of abundance of features and bandwidth I am not getting what I pay for. Also the unlimited e-mails is quite enticing to my paltry 100 account ceiling.

I understand that there is a fine line here between commercializing this thread in a XOOPS forum, but I feel it is an important thing to talk about since we all are affected by this topic.

P.S.
I welcome a Surpass Hosting rep to privately contact me regarding a possible switch.

I started with Surpass with a reseller account, then got a second, I now migrated to a dedicated server.

The service is great and quite reliable. When a hosting service has a good community following, it can only boast well.

My XOOPS site has launched since Oct. 2002 (V.1.3.7). I stayed with last host for about 2 years and switched to Surpass for half year. I also have another XOOPS site hosted elsewhere. Compare with other 2 hosts, it's sad to say my current XOOPS experience with Surpass is very bad.

Actually I was used to be happy with Surpass. The good time was last for about 3-4 months. In recent 2 months the site speed is getting slow and there's MySql downtimes which always last for a couple of minutes. The worst thing happened 16 days ago (May 15) as my site was suspended without any notice. The only answer to my first support ticket was my site ate too many server resource and need to upgrade to dedicated server. As knowing that's probably due to some sudden abnormal traffic from other forum or search engine. Yet I promised them in my reply to check and remove the modules that might have loading problems.

The ticket has been totally ignored since then so I submitted the 2nd ticket. The lastest information I received several days ago from other staff was "Looking in the suspended accounts section there appears to be a lot of open tickets. The admins will be responding to yours as soon as they can." Now the ticket is still open and my site is still down, and it has been 16 days.

That's a very terrible feeling when your site got suspended suddenly and no one is willing to give any reasonale answer why the site was suspended (even just to specify which module cause the loading problem). For over half month's waiting, seems like they just want me to pay the upgrade ransom to have my site unsuspended.

I'm confused If a XOOPS site like mine should go to dedicated, it's hard to believe any XOOPS site will not be suspended before reached 1/2 or 1/3 usuage as their plan claimed.

Here's some info of my site:

My hosting plan (power) : 3G space / 50GB bandwidth
My actual average usuage : 400-500mb space / 6-7GB bandwidth (not even use 1/10 when suspended in the middle of month)
Main modules used in my site (most of them and their blocks with cache enabled) :
News 1.3, Newbb 2.0, xfsection, xoopspoll, smartfaq, smartpartner, CJaycontent, myalbum-p (members only)
Any new modules installed : not any recently
Traffic status when suspended : stable (slight decresing monthly / slight increasing daily)

While the staff said there's a lot of open tickets in suspended section, only time will tell the recent downtime and strict suspension rules are due to their overselling or not. As for me, not knowing anybody who have the same experience for waiting more than half month on a support ticket of any host. My only hope is just to have my site and files back. I'm afraid to hear "the admins will reply as soon as they can" anymore.

Somehow it's difficult to express totally different comments in such topic, but since my choice with Surpass was mainly based on the recommendation here. I'd like to share my own experience for others.

here's the screen shot of the latest support ticket

I have been hosting my XOOPS site with surpass now for almost a year after I think Herko reccomended them to me. I have had no major problems and i am very happy with them and there service.

sure theres a bit of downtime now and again but downtime is rare and the support team always answer my tickets quickly, efficiantly and in a curtious manner, and the value for money is excellent I would have to pay probabbly well over £200-300 per year with a UK host for the same as I get with surpass for about £75 a year(it's great not having to pay VAT cos there and american company )

All in all I am very happy with surpass and I will definatley be staying with them in the future.

ByGreen I am comfused why your site was suspended for apparantly oveloading the server, I have never had any problems or any warnings from the admin that my site was using up the server too much.

On my main site MJTKOP.COM I use alot of modules I also have over 6000 images in xcgal module, I also have 2 other XOOPS sites with only a few modules one site for testing and one site as an addon domain which is my girlfriends site so I am at a loss why your site would have been using the server too much.

ANyway hope you get the problems solved, good luck.

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Thanks martyboy,

Your site is quite nice with various content. Mine is a music site too. Hopefully there's chance I could add you to my links in the future.

Currently I have no idea why my site overloading the server. In the first support ticket Surpass only replied me with canned message. As you can see, they haven't told me the actual reason until now.

Looks like we have the similar scale of the online users. I don't have that much module as you do, but I have an active forum which has about 40-80 posts everyday.

Since 6 months ago they suspended my site for the first time (their reply was also not mention the actual reason for server overloading). I've awared that Surpass has more strict suspension rules than my previous host (which I was used to use max. 20gb monthly bandwidth). So I started to limit my modules to members in rotation. I've also made a better arrangement of the whole cache system and optimized the html code of my theme. So it's frustrating and confusing they still suspended my site while the monthly bandwidth was down to 6-7gb.

@ByGreen
Yiii, that's a scary story you tell. And the image of your ticket troubles tells no lies. I can feel your pain.


Could the strategy that this company employs is to squeeze their lower tiered customers until they relent and dish out for more lucrative plans (i.e. reseller or dedicated plans)? Yikes. Hopefully that's not the case. That may explain why some of their customers here swear by them, they are the ones who have the more "expensive" plans.

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Kainaij,

I invite you to read through my post again regarding the other client's suspension issue, mainly this section below. We certainly do not feel that way. A 'lower tier' customer has no reason to upgrade if their site continues to have the same content and traffic, so that doesn't make much sense.

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ByGreen, I am currently researching your issue and your ticket will be replied to shortly, I apologize for the delay but you were emailed when the suspension occured. ByGreen, if you do choose to work with us through this problem, we are definitely going to issue you a free month of service.

Most sites are suspended due to MySQL issues. Since a large percentage of sites on any shared server more than likely use databases, you can imagine the issues that can come up and it can be hard to get everyone on the same page.

If sites never grew and had a need for more resources, then that would be excellent. These types of issues would not come up and servers would run fine 24/7. But that is not the case, and if we do nothing, then all customers on a server will begin to have problems.

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We obviously are suspending accounts to prevent that from happening. When you experience MySQL downtimes it is because another user is consuming too much. MySQL isn't just randomly timing out, an account is causing it, or a combination of multiple accounts. It is plain and simple. If we do nothing, that will continue. This has been the case with your site. The exact reason is what we have to find out.

When we say "suspended due to resource abuse," many people think we are talking about space and bandwidth. That is never the case, we give a good amount of space and bandwidth and we want you to use it. When we suspend sites, it has nothing to do with what plan you have, it is because of how much CPU and memory you are using compared to the other sites on the server.

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We certainly do not oversell, we place less then 145 users per server (Dual Xeon 2.4 2GB RAM machines) while the "industry average" is 400.

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Mainly sites that use databases and have many users are sites that begin to cause issues on a server. However, sometimes it is a bad combination of multiple programs and add-ons (and hardly any traffic at all, just basic use). We cannot predict which combinations are going to cause issues, that is another hard part about it.

I wish everyone could understand how time consuming and stressful it can be for us, too. Some servers never have any issues, and then it seems the next server we put up gets about 10 sites that are very resource intensive due to various reasons, and we have to begin to straighten that out in some way.

Hosting is not as simple as, "Put x number of users on server a and keep the ethernet cable plugged in and router operative."

So here we are, investigating programs (some we may have never heard of) and trying to get everyone situated (some cooperative, some not, some understanding, some confused), and unfortunately sometimes our tickets get drawn out and we are working to improve that. We definitely document all issues that occur and look for patterns so that in the future this is all more streamlined.

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No, I never received any email except auto replies with link to my support tickets. I definitely always wanted to work things out with you as soon as possible but never had a chance.

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I've showed my cooperation in the support ticket, but it didn't work. The way Surpass handled the issue just truned my understanding to confusion. It's very hard to keep the faith afer 18 days suspension without specific reason. Especially under the circumstance when everything (visits, bandwidth, not adding modules or blocks) of my site was stable.

Sorry to keep this like a support topic. I'd rather like to discuss with Surpass staff in a proper way but all is still just in vain now. Hope it can be solved soon and no more hopeless user like me in the future.

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No apologies necessary here. I feel it is important to hear what resolution comes of this.

I agree. It's not a 'let's praise surpass hosting' thread, but a serious discussion on the experiences with a hosting company

Herko