HawthorneVillager.com

The discussion forum was down for about 2.5 hours today....sorry.. it may go down again as I may have to either upgrade the servers/account with Canaca or move to a new host provider.

I make frequent backups, so if the forums every do go down don't worry, there are backups and they will come back up, just could take awhile depending on how/why it goes down.

Hy Constance, What's your website?

The ongoing issue I have with Canaca is I feel they oversell their accounts to greatly (i.e. the bandwidth they offer is not what you actually get). The plan I'm on with them is supposed to allow 5,200 GB of bandwidth a month. I barely hit 20GB of that each month, so I'm using less than 5% of my available bandwith, but am still having problems using that little.

They will suspend your account due to your website using too much "server resources" which is a catch-phrase they use if your site becomes too active. They offer to move us to a dedicated VPS (virtual private server) for more money but with the warning that


...they don't really help me determine how much bandwidth/activity would cause the site to use up too much "CPU usage", and cause them to suspend the site again. It's the unknown factor that bothers me. Why advertise so much bandwidth if they know they won't allow you to actually use it. At some imaginary server memory/cpu usage resource point they'll just suspend you.

Bottom line, if your site is small with not that much traffic, Canaca is a really good provider. But if your site gets bigger, it's probably safer to try and move to a host provider that gives you clear and concise information on your account limitations so you know where you stand.

At this point it's not about the money, thanks to the ad sponsors we can afford to move to a different provider. It's more about the work/support followup. Some providers offer more support, and help transitioning than others do. With Canaca it was very easy to get phpbb up and running, and for awhile they did automatic phpbb upgrades which saved me the time.

To move the site elsewhere takes time (i.e. installing phpbb on a new server, restoring our database backups to that new server properly, configuring it, etc. Then transferring the domain name over and trying to "time" the roll-over, etc).

I'm on Canaca's Silver plan, and am paying in 6 month increments at $12.95US per month.

They advised that if I upgrade to their VPS 2 plan at $21.95US per month I would likely have more 'server resources', because I'd have 1/20th of the CPU. But I have no idea how much bandwidth or max simultaneous phpbb users 1/20th one of their CPU would allow.

I've been looking at MediaLayer.com, which has an "AppLayer EX" plan for $39.95US a month, or "AppLayer LX" for $19.95US a month. Advantage with MediaLayer is they give you free setup/transitioning support, and are more customized for php applications. Plus if we grow, we can seamlessly keep our account and just be charged a bit more per month in bandwidth/usage fees. While with Canaca is you grow in size (from webhost to vps), you have to do re-install/setups from scratch yourself.

For me the biggest thing is support. Canaca doesn't offer support once you move to their VPS levels, while MediaLayer or others said they'll still give some managed support with setup issues, transitioning and future upgrades.