7 months ago, I decided to move out from DreamHost, not because DreamHost is not doing good, they do have downtime every now and then but that is not the reason. I was instead being impressed by WPWebHost, after reading several reviews from popular design blogs. WPWebHost claims to be a WordPress centric host (thus their name), which makes sense to me since all my blogs are powered by WordPress.

What finally made me push the “Order” button is when I found a 40% discount code for their $5 hosting plan, which provides 50GB of diskspace and 500GB bandwidth, way more than what all my blogs combined will ever need. $3/month, that’s almost 60% savings compare to DreamHost.

The migration

WPWebHost is using cPanel. DreamHost is not, they have their own fancy control panel. Moving from a non-cPanel host to a cPanel host is not at all straightforward. The good news is, WPWebHost doesn’t mind at all and did all the dirty work to migrate all my files and databases over.

All I need to do is to change the nameserver of my domain name and I’m ready to go. Awesome.

Uptime (or rather, downtime)

The first 3 days was impressive, with 100% uptime. Starting from the 4th day, there are downtime almost every other day, mostly 10 minutes but at times can go up to an hour.

I decided to voice my dissatisfaction to their support team, and requested to move to another server if the current one is overloaded, which might be the cause of the downtime. They agreed to move my account to a less congested machine and voila, the uptime is good again!

It just got better and better until November (5th month). Starting from December, the uptime suffers again. I once again contacted their support team and they informed me that they have suspended two accounts, and made a user to upgrade to their semi-dedicated server. The uptime did not get any better but I didn’t bother anymore.

Uptime report by Pingdom (19th July to 29th January only, anything later is no longer referring to WPWebHost) – Click

Customer Support

The two most important factor when choosing a web hosting company are reliability and customer support. I would say WPWebHost did a pretty decent job here. Emails are replied within the same day, at times, in just under half an hour—all in a friendly tone and of course, helpful information.

All was good, until…

Dear Vincent,

Good day to you.

During past few week, our technical support during a check on the server, they found out that your hosting account have use up the limit of a share WordPress account server resources. For your information, each Freedom Plan hosting account only could use around 3.33% CPU usage and the daily visitors are around 1000 because it is under shared hosting environment. There are 300 hosting accounts shared and used the same server resources. If any one of the hosting accounts over use the server resources, it will affect others hosting account site performance and vice versa.

Based on your hosting account CPU usage and daily visitors report on Jan 2010 (Please check on the attachment file), your site vincentchow.net eventually use around 64% CPU Usage and number visitor of average; 5368/day which is considered over using the server resources.

We sends this friendly reminder to inform you whether you could consider upgrading the current hosting account to Semi Dedicated Server which is only 10 hosting account per server. Please be informed that when you have the Semi-Dedicated Server Plan, you site could use more CPU usage and cater to more than 1000 daily visitors.

Kindly reply this email to us within 24 hours before our technical support takes further action. They may suspend your hosting account or take down your site if no response from you. We hope that this email reminder could avoid any unnecessary interruption for your site.

If you have any enquiries, please do not hesitate to contact us. Thank You!

After a few more email exchanges, they gave me a better picture:

CPU, Memory and MySQL resources usages
=================================
Actualy in term of CPU and Memory usages, your hosting account is no overload even some time it is over a bit for the resouces limit that we allowed which is 3.33% for both CPU and Memory usages.
Attached is the resources usages in past 4days as reference.

Bandwidth consumption
=================
Your bandwidth usages is also fine because the your site is just plain WP that does not have any flash games or media streaming beside some youtube video which link to youtube end.

Connection/Traffic
=============
This is the main reason that why we email you. Your site traffic is a lot and such website with high traffic actually does not suitable to run under a normal shared hosting server that hosts average of 300 hosting accounts.

Where you can check:
Log in Cpanel > Under Logs area, click “Awstats” > click “View” at vincentchow.net

Why not suitable for your site to run under normal shared hosting server:
When there are such large amount of visitors make connections to your website, it will actually used up our server available connections because we got set a limitation where only certain amount of connections can be accepted in a shared hosting server to prevent high resouces usages to the server and cause it not stable.

Your site visitors actually used up the connection ‘quota’ and cause other sites visitors difficult to establish connections to their website/email services because they will need to wait some of the current connection disconnect first then only can establish a new connection. Sometime they will also timeout when the server is busy with high traffic.

A semi-Dedicated server that hosts only 10 accounts will be able to fulfill your site traffic usages and kindly take a consideration on it.

The first email says I have used up to 64% of CPU resources, while the second one says that my CPU and memory usage aren’t all that bad, after all—but they are consistent in complaining that my blog’s traffic are too high for their shared hosting server to handle.

My blogs are having over 1,000 unique visitors per day since day 1 they are hosted by WPWebHost and it’s quite puzzling why they take so long to let me know all their server can take is 1,000 visitors per day.

Basically what all this meant to me is either:

• Upgrade to the WP Sumo semi-dedicated hosting plan. Monthly Fee: $79.00 / month + $25.00 Setup Fee, Annual Fee: $59.00 / month ($708/year), Bi-annual Fee: $49.00 / month ($588/year).
• Get my ass out of WPWebHost and go for another host hunting session

I picked the latter. I must say that the people at WPWebHost are really nice. Despite knowing that they will not make any money of me anymore, they do maintain their friendliness. Upon request, they agree to keep my blogs online for 10-12 more days while I work on the host migration. What’s more? I can even get my money back for the remaining months I have paid in advanced.

Verdict

If you have a blog with more than 1,000 daily visitors, stay away from WPWebHost. They have nothing in between their $5 shared hosting plan and $79 semi-dedicated plan. You will definitely find yourself in difficult situation when your blog grows beyond what a shared server can take, but not big enough to fork out the extra cash for a semi-dedicated plan.

But, if your blog is relatively small, by all means, go ahead. For just $5 (you can find 30% coupon code real easy, which will cut the fee to just $3.50 per month), you will get more than what you pay for.

I guess my 30% discount code will still work: VINCENTCHOW30

Despite all the problems listed above, I’m still a happy WPWebHost ex-customer. Offering so much for a mere $3 per month is a steal.

New host

If you can read this post, this blog is no longer with WPWebHost. I’ve decided to give HostGator a try. HostGator is not particularly impressive. They too have their fair share of bad reviews and I don’t really like their logo (sorry, lol), but here’s why:

• I need to get out of WPWebHost as soon as possible before they shut down my blogs, not much time to shop around
• HostGator’s cPanel do display CPU and memory usage information, something I would appreciate
• HostGator offer free migration service. All I have to do is to change the nameserver and I’m good to go again
• 45 days money back guarantee. I have more than a month to make sure my blogs are not using too much resources. If they do, I can move out again and have all my money back. Nothing to lose.
• Otherwise I can also upgrade to HostGator’s VPS plan, not too expensive