Hi,

I'm considering developing a new XOOPS site, and using Surpass.com as my web host. I learned about Surpass through some of the posts here.

The Surpass hosting plans look great. However, I've noticed quite a few recent posts in their forum, regarding slow load times, web sites that won't load at all, and problems with their servers.

I'm wondering about the experiences of other XOOPS users who use Surpass to host their XOOPS site.

How efficiently does Surpass handle moderate to high traffic XOOPS sites, especially with their shared hosting plans?

Dave

had this issue as well but after some complaints my site seems faster. check it out; see what you think.

I just moved to Surpass on 10/19. The good thing is that the new server I have (Name Deso) is super fast. up/down load files via ftp, it was almost flawless, unlike the other servers time out a lot. And the page load is super also.

Now the bad words:

Since 10/22, the server down time is not as they said 99.9% up time. Several hours each on 10/22 afternoon and this morning. I was running a pay per click ad and all my money is down to the drain because of the interruption of service.

They continue to have growing pains as they expand their servers to handle the load. They are efficient in getting the job done, but lack proper email communication to it's clients.

I refuse to search the forums for what they did last week, or have planned for down the road. This is the only gripe I have with Surpass as I find this level of communication very sloppy.

They are well aware of their technical issues and I have every confidence in them that they will get the job done. They have yet to fail or let me down on anthing they have done so for.

Patience on my part is the key. I've griped so loud to them on a past issue I had,(private emails) they many of the top level people in customer service had to approach me in order to calm down. I ended up getting people outside of customer care emailing me. I'm a prick when I'm paying for something and don't get satisfaction, be that a soother or a complete solution.

Give it time, the issue will be put to rest, they have too much to loose if they act otherwise. I am quite confident in their ability to improve service. It's the bumps in the road when they make these changes that make people on their forums moan a bit. It's understandable and it happens everywhere.

Hi tjnemez, Jackwan, and Stewdio,

Thanks for all your input.

I need to weigh the tradeoff between the generous amount of capacity they offer, and their current technical issues. Their Power, Deluxe, and Pro plans are better than anything I've seen. However, if my site is going to load so slow or crash so much that it turns away web traffic on a constant basis, then this would be a major problem.

From what I read in their forums, a couple of customers ran scripts that overwhelmed their servers. I'm not sure how other hosts handle that problem, but I would think that there would be some kind of threshold mechanism to shut off a site when it starts hogging too much capacity. Or, maybe this is just one of the disadvantages of using shared hosting, rather than a dedicated server. Unfortunately, I can only afford a shared package at this time.

I'm still wondering how XOOPS performs in general on shared hosting configurations. I've not used an XOOPS site in a moderate or high traffic environment as of yet, so I really don't know how it will perform.

Generally, what is the maximum amount of traffic that an XOOPS site can handle on a shared server (without frequent slowdowns, crashes, or getting shutdown by the hosting service)? I'm not sure if anyone has a definitive answer to this, but I'm just curious if anyone has any observations or experiences to share regarding this.

Dave

Dave,

They put people on servers at random and they have many servers, my experiences does not reflect the overall performance of surpass, just bad luck, I guess. Also, people tended to report bad things and none of these low cost hosting services are perfect. I switched to Surpass because I was disappointed with another service.

All shared services have the same problem, I think dedicated service is the only way to go if you want reliability.

I would still highly recommend Surpass. Overall their service is excellent and their support is fast to respond. As for using XOOPS with them, they are fully capable. They are an XOOPS supporter and have offered deals to XOOPS users in the past.

The glitches they have are always just temporary.

if you'd like an alternative host, i've been hosting friends for free for quite awhile now, and i'm just now starting pay plans

HSphere is the control panel that I use, it's 10x better than cPanel (which is why I chose it).

since i'm just now starting the pay service, my hosting site is under construction, but the Control Panel is complete with a Helpdesk Ticket system and Knowledgebase/FAQ


If you'd like to see the available plans, PM me

We apologize for any slowdowns anyone may have experienced, but with shared servers it is inevitable. It is not a completely perfect environment due to the different types of sites and the activities performed. We do move sites to different servers as we see any issues reported and evaluate site activity on the server (CPU and memory usage logs). I guess you could call it internal server organization. :)

We immediately check out any problems reported at our helpdesk and resolve them as quickly as possible to retain normal server load. A server can go weeks or even months without any bumps, and one unfortunate day a script can get caught in a loop, or there is MySQL abuse. We have quite a lot of shared servers, and once in a while something is going to come up. We certainly would rather it not as it hurts our customers and us, but we can't put 3 sites on each server. ;)

You can post in our forum, surmunity.com 'Attn Teq' if you have further questions about your account or the server that you are on. I would be happy to help and see if there is anything I can do to improve your service.

Our network uptime has been 100% for the past two months. Any downtime is server downtime: related to one server and an issue with an account on that server.

Sincerely,
Kayla

hey Kayla,

thanks for all the support, great job.