Hello,

I have a ZenCart web shop hosted by streamline.net. From the outset (approx 1 year ago) performance has never been too hot. However, more recently (say within the past few months) performance has been terrible! Obviously I mostly use the admin pages which now, always seems to suffer from slow refreshes and page timeouts - the main site also suffers similar problems and, given that images are fairly well optimised, I'm guessing the problem is with database queries or PHP execution. I must add that very occasionally, the site does perform well but it is usually short lived! Things came to a head yesterday when the site was unavailable from 10am to 11pm (bedtime!). I managed to login to admin this morning but now it appears down again.
I've reported the problem many times to streamline.net support but they are as good as hopeless - they say they are waiting for their engineers to report back but give no indication of when this would be! I think I'm ready to leave them!
So a few questions....

Has anyone else experienced this with Streamline.net?
Is there anything I can do to increase performance?
Any personal recommendations for Zen Cart 'compatible' servers in the UK?

the website is www.my_username_on_this_forum.co.uk


Many thanks in advance,

Jonathan

Hi Jonathan.

Welcome to eSF.

Site doesn't seem to load at all?

Nick

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http://www.ediblegraphics.com

Hiya

Definitely a problem there.
One question, was it loading recently, and have you made any changes since?

Nick

P.S. Lawrence can sort you out. Fret not.

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http://www.ediblegraphics.com

Nick,

Thanks for the rapid response!

You're right, it's not working at the moment. Though it did load this morning.

Nothing serious changed in the last few months other than adding products and uploading video. Last night I did attempt a database backup but that failed.

This is a no-frills site - the only real major mod (other than template changes) is the addition of royalmail shipping.

Cheers,

Jonathan

Hi

Have you checked with your provider that they are all up and running? [Usually if you type in there domain you can tell.]

What did they have to say about your site not running?

Nick

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http://www.ediblegraphics.com

I'm at work at the moment and my host's site is blocked so I can't check now but, when my site was down yesterday, they were reporting no problems.

I haven't had their response to my complaint yesterday (they have 24hours - till about 8pm tonight) but all they have to do is respond to the support ticket, not resolve the problem.

Jonathan

It's up and running now 10:15am

Hiya

Site looks great by the way.

They probably have major bandwidth issues, especially if you find your site down between 7 and 9 am.

It seems to be running ok now, but if you are worried about your hosting [not without cause], have a word with Lawrence when he gets on.

Nick

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http://www.ediblegraphics.com

Nick,

Thanks for the compliment - still lots to do and no time to do it!

The site is performing very well now - it doesn't get much better than this, it's almost as if they've flicked a switch!

Jonathan

Great, good luck and if you ever need any help, we're here.

Nick

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http://www.ediblegraphics.com

Hi Jonathan

Your site loaded fine when I looked at it just now, but when I looked at Streamline's site, this bit stood out to me

Un-restricted Visitor Bandwidth:
Bandwidth (data transfer) is a measure of the amount of data transferred by your Website. For example if your Website is a total of 1mb and 1000 people view it in one month the bandwidth used for that month would be 1000mb (1Gb). If we cannot host your Website due to high bandwidth we will refund the entire hosting fee.

They are giving people "un-restricted" bandwidth from £13.99/yr. You should always avoid any shared hosting that gives you "un-restricted" bandwidth. It might sound great but what you have to consider is that everyone else on the same server also has "un-restricted" bandwidth too, so you're likely to be sharing a server with people running file download sites or dozens of kids who think they're going to create the next YouTube. It may sound illogical, but you're far better off with an account with limited bandwidth than unlimited, even if it costs more.

Their maths is also wrong in the above statement. If the size of your site was 1MB and 1000 people visited you, then the bandwidth used wouldn't be 1GB (They also seem confused between Bytes and bits, as well as milli and Mega) as not everyone who visits your site will view every page.The vast majority of visitors to a website only view a fraction of the site's content, so the above passage is extremely misleading.

I also noticed that they have registered your domain to themselves

http://whois.domaintools.com/atomicworkshop.co.uk

This could be a problem if they want to be awkward about you changing hosts, because as far as Nominet is concerned your name isn't on the WHOIS for the domain.

I also found these.

http://www.xomreviews.com/streamlinenet.co.uk

http://www.ciao.co.uk/Streamline_net__Review_5592901

If I was you, I would change hosts.

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Lawrence

Good advice Lawrence..I would be changing
today or sooner!!!

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Ready made zencarts/Zencart Templates/Mods Available

If the above hasn't convinced you to migrate servers, then perhaps these will.

http://dropshipforum.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=1107

http://www.s2forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15842

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Lawrence

OK it's been a while but thanks for all the comments and especially review links. As I posted previously, the site was up and running and working fine - this continued for about 3weeks until I gradually noticed performance dropping off again. Since then I've had sporadic poor performance. The annoying thing is that Streamline never admit to what the problem is and it never appears to be a permanent fix.

I'm almost certainly losing business and customers as a result of poor performance as I know how fristrating it is when visiting sites and receiving timeouts.

So I'm now down to transferring seriously and as I understand I need to do the following:-

• Change the registrant on my domain name as this is currently registered to Streamline.net. I think I need to contact nominet and fill in a form which Streamline will then 'countersign', but my question is, can I change the registrant to myself or does it have to be the new hosting company?

• Next select new hosting company. As has been advised, limited bandwidth seems the way to go and so I need to estimate my monthly bandwidth usage. I currently use matrixstats but do the bandwidth figures include database lookups?

• Download site from existing host and upload to new host - edit configuration files to reflect new directory/SQL info

• Update DNS

• Cancel contract with Streamline.net

The only way you can change the registrant to yourself is to become a domain registrant with your own IPS TAG. In other words, unless you are considering getting into the domain registration business you will need to use an existing domain registrant.

Database lookups don't use bandwidth, they are either done locally or on a dedicated MySQL server on the same network. Excessive database lookups will use system resources and slow the server down, but they don't directly affect the bandwidth.

There's one step you missed. You need to change name servers, then update the DNS records. The hierarchy for a NOMINET domain e.g. .co.uk is

IPS TAG > Nameserver(s) > DNS records > Web Server

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Lawrence