Webhosting & Hosting Reviews

If you check the forums of Hostgator you can see how active the users are there, and not just like this but you will get help from hostgator support team and even experienced customers. Here is a problem that I found on their forum a user in hostgator reseller plan that have his online business with them and he had some problems with his shopping cart. Read the full story and the support:

Problem: I’m on a reseller plan. The server I’m hosted on has dual 2.4ghz CPUs. I was having some weird shopping cart problems, so I called up the shopping cart people and they said it sounded like a server load issue.

I checked the load avg, and it’s fluxuating between 4 and 9. Currently it’s at 5.88. From what I’ve read this is really high, and the shopping cart people are sure this is the problem (since nothing in the code nor database has changed at all).

I contacted gator phone support, he said to contact ticketed support (sort of a pain to be thrown from one to the next, but whatever), then ticket support comes back and says “the server load may climb up to 7-8 during the peak hours but you do not need to worry about this load. The servers are dual xeons with 4 gigs or RAM and are strong enough to deal with this load.”

Does this sound right?

My shopping cart people have flat out told me that they cannot help me till I get the server load issue taken care of (they said it needs to be atleast below 4). I hate getting stuck in the middle, and meanwhile I’m losing money since my online shop isn’t working right…..

After the user submited the ticket:

in LESS THAN AN HOUR, I got a reply saying

Hello,

That’s about 80% of our peak load, we can usually hover around 90% and stay up and fast. We are currently at 30 load or so, but it looks to be loading fine.

If you have any further questions, concerns, or comments, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Zach E
Level I System Administrator
HostGator LLC

ome on!! the status was flashing red @ 20+ how can that be “normal” or within the average load!!

I just did check it again in its wooping 31.31 & at the top right you can see it did pass the 43!!

Solution & Explanation: Two things everybody in this thread needs to understand:

1. Load numbers are *NOT* comparable from server to server. They are absolute numbers, not relative. They are not percentages– they are counts. This means that faster servers can handle a load of 5 far better than slower ones. Hostgator’s new servers can handle far over 5 without problems. Servers from 5 years ago would choke it this. That makes blanket statements like “A dual CPU should not be always over 2.00″ inaccurate. Remember: one day in future-server-land, loads of 100+ will be nothing.

2. “Flashing red” means nothing as well. “Red” is not something the server does when it thinks the load is too much– it’s just a setting. The default is absurdly low in cPanel because it doesn’t depend on the server it’s being installed on. A server admin can make the “red flash” happen at a load of .5, or a load of 500. It’s arbitrary.

Another experienced customer replying: What a load of crap they are trying to feed you. Server load issues don’t really effect the operation of websites beyond them being slow. Load issues can cause time outs, which is a problem, but likely telling you that you need to fix your load because it as to be below 4 is stupid. As others have pointed out, a load of 4 on my server wouldn’t be anything. A load of 4 on my very first server would mean that not one site was working… and likely mail wasn’t flowing either.

If you missed the last post about hostgator check it here Hostgator vs Hostgaroo: Competition Fights Back