I recently received notifcation from Lunarpages Support that I have seven days (six, now) to move my site from "Shuttle" hosting to "dedicated" hosting. (I'm still waiting to hear back from Support, so, in the meantime, I thought I'd ask for information here.)

Traffic on my site has decreased over the last few months, but has apparently recently become entirely too large for shared hosting to handle. (I say "apparently" because I haven't changed anything on my end, and bandwidth is only now creeping up to what is was four months ago.)

My fifty-or-so megs of small static HTML files and smaller GIF graphics are generating about forty gigs of bandwidth a month.

I get about ten thousand visitors a day; it was around fifteen thousand a day back in October.

I have no forums, blogs, galleries, or the like. The only "script" I'm running is for processing a mail form; this script is secure, up-to-date, and is used, if we're busy, maybe a half-dozen times a day.

The site's e-mail was some time ago moved to an outside service, as Lunarpages could not handle the volume of dictionary-attack spam. I was getting about 150K invalidly-addressed messages a day nearly a year ago; the volume is currently down to under thirty thousand a day.

I am somewhat familiar with what is involved in "bandwidth" drain, but I do not know precisely how processor-demand relates to this. For instance, I yesterday learned that serving up a two-kilobyte graphic every three minutes or so uses about ten percent of the CPU's "httpd" processing power, which I found very surprising.

My stats (as provided by the log files) for the last two weeks are as follows:

• 4009323 "hits" (calls for files; about 286,380 file calls a day, including "cached")
• 500,037 "pageviews" (about 35,717 pageviews a day)
• 174,698 "sessions" (a proxy for "visitors"; about 12,478 visitors a day)
• 17,995,844 "KB sent" (bandwidth, not counting e-mail; about 1.23 gigs a day)

Keeping in mind that e-mail would be handled by an outside service, does the above listing sound like something that a dedicated server here at Lunarpages might be able to handle, or am I going to have to find some other host for my (apparently huge) site?

Thank you for your time.

Eliz.

I'm just a math teacher. I don't know this web-guru hardware-geek stuff. Is there any support for the dedicated-server accounts, or would I be on my own?

Support said I needed to move to dedicated hosting, but then hasn't responded for twenty-seven hours and counting, which is making me more than a little nervous. I know I'm not supposed to post more to my ticket until I hear back from them, but I'm running out of time, and now I'm starting to wonder if Support is expecting me to handle everything on my own from here on out...?

Eliz.

for all questions regarding dedicated servers = email---> dedicated@lunarpages.com

I am not sure how this quere system works, does all tickets from all areas go into one pile ? I would think that they would go to separate places for separate techs to look at each area,, if so then your dedicated ticket wouldnt affect the one you are waiting on now,,, but how is one to know ? Guess its not worth the risk with your short timeline,  that really bites, is there not anyone that can answer the phone there and maybe not answer your question about your problem but answer these other questions we have been discussing tonight ?? Surely ? ,,,, but maybe we should leave her out of this  ,, lol I wish you the best of luck, I have never seen it take so long for LP to react to a problem, and not just yours there is alot of this going on lately.

Concerned RAT

The managed hosting option would probably be the best choice for you since it lets LP take care of most of the behind the scenes items... at least that's my understanding. There was another thread recently about skills needed to run a dedicated server that discussed it in a bit more detail...

It looks like if I add the extra ten-dollar monthly charge, that would convert the "dedicated" account to a "managed" one.

Why would cPanel cost an additional thirty-five dollars a month?

It's another ten dollars whenever Lunarpages reboots the servers...?

And I'm not clear on the "clustering" thing. Is it a hundred bucks a month for the account, and then another hundred for the actual server?

I'm probably just misunderstanding the situation, but Lunarpages' prices seem kinda high, especially considering that I can't ask Support any questions about the details. Any generic information or experienced advice would be very much appreciated!

Thank you.

Eliz.

Hi there.  You're in the exact same boat I was in two months ago, and our traffic seems similar.  There's good news and bad news... the good news is that when I shopped around for hosts, LP still came in about $100 cheaper per month than you're quoting there than the next cheapest one.  The bad news is that Dedicated I (the cheapest dedicated host) still couldn't handle the load of my forums (50 to 80 users at once) and I had to upgrade to Dedicated II ($185 a month with memory upgrade they said I needed).

The further good news is that a similar plan elsewhere would cost over $300.  So pick your poison, a popular site isn't cheap to host. 

The reason everybody pays the $35 for CPANEL is that it makes the interface to the site look exactly like it does for you on the shared accounts.  With that, it's the exact same login and same icons in the same places and it all looks the same.  You won't even know they've switched you to the new server until they tell you. 

Here's the difference... on the shared server, they always have staff watching the server.  On dedicated, that doesn't happen unless you pay the $10 a month for managed hosting.  Then they have it set up so it alerts someone if your site crashes.  If you don't, as I didn't, then if you get downtime you have to call and tell them.  You'll stay down until you let them know you're down.  I was gone at work one day and stayed down for six hours before I came home, saw what happened, and called in.

The downside of dedicated is that it's MUCH harder to get support.  There are only a few technicians there who can help with dedicated hosting, the regular support staff can't.  They will refer you to them if you try to call in. 

There is essentially no phone support for dedicated... the person on the call might try to track down an Admin for you but they don't have dedicated tech support manning the phone lines.  They tell you to use the special Dedicated Chat Room instead, or fill out an e-mail support ticket. 

The Dedicated Chat (which is up even if regular Live Chat isn't) works great if you log in during business hours, they'll jump right on it.  I mean, within seconds.  If you log in during off-hours, you can sit for a very long time if the techs happen to be busy elsewhere.  They have much fewer staff at night so if you're sitting there losing money on your site, prepare for some tense hours.

For instance, I've had dedicated chat open in another window for over an hour now hoping to catch someone, no response.  Are they working on my problem?  Did they get my ticket?  Do they know I'm in there?  No idea.

But, if you want a host with 24-hour instant phone support, you'll have to go elsewhere and pay more.  That's the tradeoff.  LP is a low-cost host, that's how it works.