I have something I think is interesting that I'd like to float by you all.
I've been approached by a client to assist with his Drupal installation on Network Solutions. In short, it's slow and producing errors.
In the Network Solutions control panel, you can install a default copy of Drupal. It has a basic installer and a module adding interface. Knowing that NetSol wouldn't even talk to me for a custom install, I installed their default copy. I then used their tool to enable Devel.
Devel showed me that the execution time on the SQL calls were ridiculously slow and the checking for available updates would time out.
After several laborious communications (email and phone), I got this gem:
I am sorry for any issues you had with latency or other issues with Drupal. I changed your /cgi-bin/php.ini to speed up Drupal. However, Drupal is a very resource-intense application. We do not guarantee the performance of Drupal on our hosting as it is very bulky software.
If your Drupal is not connecting to the Drupal update server, please contact Drupal support. We only support making changes or updates to Drupal through the "Upgrade" link in Account Manager. If there is no "Upgrade" link for Drupal in your Open Source Library we cannot support updating it. This is third-party software we provide for free as a customer convenience.
At this time, moving to another host is not an option I've been given. If anyone has any tips to deal with NetSol, I'm all ears.
Otherwise, I at least wanted to share that NetSol has taken to blaming their awful performance on "very bulky software" that they "provide for free as a customer convenience".
Comments
Network Solutions says Drupal is "very bulky software"
I have used drupal on godaddy and bluehost and it is slow and from what I understand because it is a CMS it can run slow on undedicated servers. So isn't the best solution to run drupal on your own server? And shouldn't we expect at least somewhat slowed performance on most webhosts? I am currently trying a host called greengeeks who say their servers manage drupal sites better than the average host ;) So I am hopeful for improved speed from my current, bluehost. The main slowness I find is when updating the site, moreso than navigating and that is what I have come to expect since the site is a database after all. Planning to get our own server soon which would solve the slownesses...curious if anyone has found a cost effective, yet speedy host for a drupal site?
Web hosts far too often
Web hosts far too often oversell their shared servers, causing slowdowns, which they blame on the content.
I have had excellent luck with Atlantic Webhost (in Salem, MA) and have been with them for years. I was also surprised that LunarPages behaved well too. Network Solutions, GoDaddy, BlueHost, 1and1 and Hostway were all insufficient.
I think web hosting providers want you to believe you need a dedicated server, but you don't need it just to run Drupal. No way. Other factors may dictate a dedicated server, but not Drupal alone.
What level of hosting do you pay for on Atlantic?
I am having huge issues with a client's Drupal 6 website on Godaddy. Maybe you have read about this! I keep getting internal server errors, and they basically say that's what you get with shared hosting.
Thanks,
Nan
I had good luck on the
I had good luck on the MediaTemple Grid system, which is a shared, elastic system. Hosting costs $17/mo (with coupon code 'kirupa07'):
http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/
DB resources can be dialed up by purchasing one of their 'containers':
- LITE = 128MB RAM for $20/month
- PRO = 256MB RAM for $75/month
- ADVANCED = 512MB RAM for $150/month
The grid is very good at handing random spikes in activity (digg effect) but uptime is not always there. All-in-all it's a good starter system that scales nicely for a site where 100% uptime is not critical. Ultimately though we scaled beyond what the grid could handle and went to a cluster of dedicated servers at another vendor.
Hope that helps,
ej
GreenGeeks
I have been hosting with greengeeks for about a year - they have been excellent - speedy (Drupal 6) and tech support is great. As a solution for hosting small business clients that can't afford anything above shared hosting, they have been great. I have not tried running Drupal 7, and none of my clients on that server gets huge traffic, but the admin pages and the updates, cron etc. are all pretty zippy. Of course there is always the downside of being in a shared environment, but so far it has worked out.
Handbook on Platform Cooperativism, a movement building platforms and tools owned by the people. http://bit.ly/hackitownit
Don't believe greengeeks
They come across so nice at the beginning. Truth is they are a bunch of liars. To add injury to insult they serious limit your your server resources so if you want to host a site with as little as 200 visitors per day be prepared to get an upsell on resources or live with server errors due to the limitations you have. I've built dozens of Drupal sites, hosted with many different providers, and let me tell you that these guys are, BY FAR, the worst. As far as support, if you like canned responses and a footer with an ad for an upsell then you'll love these guys. And finally, if you want to back up and move from these goofballs, be prepared... they have disabled backups in cpanel. What a colossal joke!!!
GO with a compnay that supports Drupal Community!
There are several companies that specialize in Drupal hosting: VPS.net, Acquia just started an affordable plan, WebEnabled, etc
The only bad luck we have had was Rackspace Cloud Sites.
ditto and Hot Drupal
and Hot Drupal http://www.hotdrupal.com/
www.macpheedesign.com
Plus One for HotDrupal
We've been very happy with HotDrupal.
Steve Brown is focused on Drupal sites, and is very knowledgeable and helpful. We've been running two sites with them (both on a rented, dedicated machine, with back-up/development copies of the sites on VMs) for two years, with no issues whatsoever.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/davedrexler
I've been using Hot Drupal
I've been using Hot Drupal for years now and have nothing but good things to say about their speed and support. I'm not using their entry level plan so I can't comment on it but Steve has been great with support when needed but in general everything just works.
Chris Grant
Senior Visualization Artist | HMC Architects
Portfolio | christophergrant.com
IE Drupal | g.d.o/inland-empire
Always an option
Moving to another host is always an option, unless the site's owner has stock in Netsol. I can almost guarantee that you would save money going elsewhere. Just for example, the last time I looked, Netsol charged $24.95 for the same domain name that you can get at GoDaddy for $9.95. Where's the advantage?
Any host that uses a MySql server that is outside your box is going to be slower. Take a look at all the reviews on DO; that is a consistent complaint. For this reason, I have concerns about any "cloud" host that doesn't make a big deal about having tuned their database server for the cloud environment.
And any host that makes me use their service instead of allowing me to build Drupal the right way, won't have me as a customer very long.
And I would argue that any host that knows Drupal will sell you a shared hosting plan that runs as well as a VPS on a host that doesn't know Drupal, as Netsol apparently does not.
Is Drupal heavy compared to a customized HTML site? Absolutely. Is it overkill for some simple sites? You bet. But, in my experience, there are very few sites that stay the way they were originally implemented. That's where a decent CMS (it doesn't have to be Drupal) comes into its own. With any decent CMS, one can grow the site and add features with relative ease. Just try changing the menu on an HTML site - been there, done that and now those two sites are on Drupal, and running just as well.
And just a negative impression: my current customer is using Joyent, and I am underwhelmed, especially with support and host administration. I have no idea what they cost (their site doesn't even give a hint), but the customer has already asked about moving and I haven't even been there two weeks yet. There was an outage this morning - IMHO, a cloud system should never have an outage.
Nancy Dru
Too true! I'm continuing to
Too true!
I'm continuing to try and get the client to approve a move. Until then, they're paying me to fight with NetSol. I told them it was not money well spent...
But...
But it's good money in your pocket.
Nancy Dru
Do you really need a server?
Drupal garden looks like interesting solution for simple sites... No fuss, no administration, and I bet they can balance the load between sites very nicely in order to handle activity spikes.
Linode - your own virtual server. Worked well for me.
There might be negatives I am unaware of. However, after months of using Linode, I am so far quite pleased.
Yes, you have to build your own server, but they have everything from a basic install to scripts. They even have a Mercury install script, which I tested briefly, but didn't use. $19.95 a month for 512meg ram, 12 gigs or so. Don't recall the allotted bandwidth off the top of my head, and I have NO idea how much processor time. But, with over 40 modules installed, tweaked settings for mysql, APC, memcache, etc.. can get anywhere from 10 to 20 page requests per second, thats uncached. As always, YMMV.
Second using Linode or other Virtual Host solutions
For several years I used a shared host environment (which was actually a virtual host setup, just really paired down CPU and ram allocations) it was only $9/mth but the performance for my personal website just got worse and worse.. and my Drupal site and the modules I installed hadn't changed for about a year, yet the performance kept getting worse.
So I compared Linode to slicehost to amazon web services, I use slice host for many of my clients, but the price point wasn't as good as linode. So considering my personal website as an opportunity to try out the provider and.. I couldn't be happier.
Granted, like any virtual host you have to install a fresh installation (I chose ubuntu) then do all of the system's administration, application server installs, etc. But that can be a blessing because you can also install apc or e-accelerator and memcache or varnish (mostly useful if you are going to use a multi-virtual machine setup) to greatly improve performance and stability. I guess the rule is, if you want performance and stability (but don't want to pay through the noise for managed support) you can't get it on a shared hosting platform.
If your clients wants e-commerce or sophisticated aggregation or distribution sites built on Drupal and they won't have a budget for a virtual or dedicated server that would be a clear indication that they may not be a good client and or they don't realize the resource requirements for the features they are asking for.
Robert Foley Jr
Solutions Architect
http://www.robertfoleyjr.com
The truth
quote: If your clients wants e-commerce or sophisticated aggregation or distribution sites built on Drupal and they won't have a budget for a virtual or dedicated server that would be a clear indication that they may not be a good client and or they don't realize the resource requirements for the features they are asking for.
How very true. :-)
Wear shoes that fit
I've worked with Drupal on all kinds of hosting solutions and it really boils down to the specific needs of the site. I've run as many as half a dozen small Drupal sites off of a single, small shared hosting environment, and I've worked on Drupal sites that require a load-balanced server array to handle the volume of users and nodes.
Based on my experience with Network Solutions, their declaration that Drupal is "bulky" is much more a reflection on NS's service than on Drupal.
Déja Augustine
www.dejaaugustine.com
Switch to the cloud...
I recently decided to try a dedicated cloud server because I was not happy with the speed of Network Solutions shared hosting. I could not be happier with the difference in speed and I have since migrated almost all of my web properties to my cloud server. Plus...the cost savings are ridiculous...I went from paying over a $150 a month to about $15 a month and everything is quicker.
It takes a little more knowledge to run a cloud server but believe me...if you can build a drupal site you can manage a server.
I keep a blog about development...mostly so I don't forget stuff and I recently put up some tips on setting up and managing a cloud server...and using Drush to create new sites: http://betaprogrammer.com/content/
THE PROBLEM IS NETWORK SOLUTIONS
Network Solutions was SO slow for my client (accahc.org) that we couldn't even work on the site and had trouble visiting it. I optimized our MySQL database and went through all the speed hoops to no avail. NS kept blaming our CMS. I moved the site to Go Daddy and the site was immediately faster. Even with Go Daddy.
MIKO, Creative Technical Support and Developer
Miko's Support and Design Services, Seattle
http://mikosweb.com
Options
I used to use 1and1.com to run Drupal, until I experienced how horrible their setup was for Drupal.
Godaddy was just as bad.
Everyone is right about the shared hosting services, how they oversell. However, if price is an issue for you and you don't have the experience of someone who might be able to run a VPS like linode.com, I've been content with using site5.com for my Drupal sites. It does slow down at times but their customer support is pretty decent and are fast to respond to your problems. They always let you know if there is something weird going on with their shared services servers within their forums. You can't beat the price, for like around 9 bucks a month. Out of all the shared webhosting plans, site5.com is good enough to handle a Drupal site, and they won't tell you that Drupal sucks.
Fifth for Hot Drupal
I do find most shared hosting providers oversell their servers and are stingy with RAM. This has not been my experience with Hot Drupal. For VPS I have used HawkHost and KnownHost and have been pleased with both.
Network Solutions MySQL latency is the Issue
I'd echo the sentiments of Miko and others. If you have a database driven website on NetSol what they try to do is push/upsell you into a VPS or Dedicated server. I moved a dozen or so Joomla/Drupal websites from NetSol to other hosts where the MySQL server is better tuned for CMS setups. Nothing else changed mind you just the latency issue.
http://jwwicks.com/blog/item/network-solutions-nshosting-shared-can-t-ha...
Jw
Network Solutions - Drupal 7 - php.ini, .htaccess, settings.php
Network Solutions... not awesome for Drupal 7. All files uploaded with FTP get wrong permissions by default. You need a bunch of custom server settings to get Drupal 7 working without 404, 403, forbidden, admin access denied, and clean URLs, memory limit, or session errors. They have wasted a couple days of my time this week. I read that they are slow and oversell shared hosting, but I am still under development, can't confirm that yet.
Drupal 7 settings for network solutions:
php.ini (in the cgi-bin directory above the htdocs web root folder)
Lots of fun server settings here.
register_globals = off;upload_max_filesize = 20M;
post_max_size = 96M;
memory_limit = 128M;
output_buffering = 2048;
magic_quotes_gpc = 0;
session.auto_start = 0;
mbstring.http_input = pass;
mbstring.http_output = pass;
mbstring.encoding_translation = 0;
--
.htaccess (in drupal install directory)
Use drupal default .htaccess, and uncomment the RewriteBase including your folder name if it's a subfolder of htdocs.
RewriteBase /myfolder--
settings.php (755 the permissions temporarily so FTP works)
Comment out the $cookie_domain, and uncomment the $base_url and put your URL.
$base_url = 'http://mydomain.com'; // NO trailing slash!--
Hope this saves some time.
Well
This is the same company that charges $29.95 for a domain name that Godaddy sells for $10 (and makes money). They know "bloated."
Nancy Dru
Is NetSol any better years on?
Hi
I've just bumped into this discussion.
I just bought a domain name and hosting from netsol for $1.22 just 3 days ok. I know - its a ridiculously cheap price so you might expect bad performance from my website.
It seems like a good response though. I'm at work (not the fastest connection around) and just loaded my website which took 7.5 seconds. I logged in about 0.1 seconds. I could browse about fine.
Have NetSol improved? It seems like maybe they have?
Saying that, I logged a query with NetSol Support about 3 days ago but not had a response back yet except to say that the issue has been logged. So the Support you receive might not be good but the speed of the web-site seems pretty good (so far :).
Cheers for now
Matthew
p.s I am new to Drupal. Is there a performance tool I can run to really put things to the test?
A number of monitor and performance tools
I should put in a plug for the new O'Reilly book, "High performance Drupal" which walks through several areas in which Drupal performance can bottleneck and how to detect/come up with better solutions. There was a good presentation on the subject this past week at Drupal Nights in Cambridge, MA. http://www.drupalnights.org/events/2014-01-16-233000/panel-high-performa... . The YouTube broadcast of the presentation is also available from that page. The last slide contains some excellent additional references.
Network Solutions is the worst
I had a client last spring whose site was on NetSol, and we had a lot of issues with them. They were so incompetent, I can't believe they can stay in business. When I called tech support, they never understood what I was trying to do. They did things incorrectly, they were bumbling idiots. We moved the site to a different host, and had a horrible time getting refunded. Every single thing that needed to happen became a huge issue.
The domain name is still registered there, and I would like to move it but I am actually afraid to try. I remember a client years ago not being able to move it to a different registrar.
If you are on the correct host, Drupal can be as speedy as possible. If you need a fabulous suggestion, give me a holler.
Nan
As a comment, Drupal is
As a comment, Drupal is "bulky" and can need more resources than are provided at very low end hosting packages. It IS a very inefficient way to present "mostly static" pages. If a site is going to be a simple blog or something else similarly simple, then some other tool may be better. If the site is going to be more complicated, now or in the forseeable future, than Drupal may be a good solution.
My experience is that the main point where cheap hosting packages give problem is that they have the memory limit to PHP set to low for larger Drupal sites (a low PHP memory limit lets them run more sites on a single box). The way Drupal runs, it seems to load a lot of data about the site into RAM, I think this is one of the things that is being worked on in Drupal 8.
If the hosting package includes an installer for Drupal, then presumably they provide the resources for at least a moderate Drupal site (if not, then they should EXPECT to get a lot of support issues with problems).
Drupal Performance Tweaks
I was just on a panel discussion at BioRAFT in Cambridge, MA last Thursday, on this very topic - Here is my blog about it:
http://agaric.com/blogs/drupal-nights-high-performance-drupal
Handbook on Platform Cooperativism, a movement building platforms and tools owned by the people. http://bit.ly/hackitownit