Hosting Company

[ravenfire]

Not sure if Im allowed to say their name, so I wont, but I moved to a new webhost in October. To start with their service was great, telephone support was very quick and they answered my support tickets within 24 hours. However, this only lasted a couple of days then I never got a reply to another ticket for months! We started having problems with the site going down and I thought then, that after less than 2 months with them I was going to have to move hosts when suddenly service improved again and the site has been running great.

However, the problem is that whilst I had a reply to one ticket within the 16 hours they then said would be the protocol under their new system they have never replied to another once since! When I originally looked up this webhosts they had a good reputation but obviously since then they have had a big demand and cant keep up with it. Now their reputation is rubbish and they have nothing but complaints about them everywhere. According to other people that are with them they pay money and then never receiving hosting!

Im stuck now. This month my bandwidth seems to be being eaten up like made and I really need to increase it, but whats the hope when these people never answer? If anyone would like to know the name of these hosts so that they can avoid them at all costs then please PM me. I will tell you that they are UK based. And also if anyone can suggest any ways to reduce bandwidth for this month I would be very grateful.

Thanks

[wimpie]

check in the statistics section whats eating so much of your bandwidth, its possible you have nice files stored and someone passed the link to it on other websites/forums.
maybe you use a lot flash, or have flash games on your site, they eat a lot bandwidth, and also possible your ftp is hacked and your space/bandwidth is used by a hacker to provide files, so check your folders for unknown files.

[ravenfire]

Im not sure what to look for to be honest. I have awstats so its pretty detailed.

I use Cpanel and Im not sure how to stop hotlinking in case thats a problem. When I have tried the members that have AOL see red crosses where the pictures should be!

[MikeC]

Are you on a dedicated server or just a shared hosting account as its a lot easier to discover if you had root access. To be honest i believe you could have mentioned the name as it will help people not go for them ;) but please PM the name if you do not wish to mention it as i have had many run ins myself with many hosting companies and have now gone dedicated so as i get more control over things.

The main things to look for in the stats is the most requested files as this is a big give away if someone is robbing the bandwidth off of your site - another thing to look for is are you hosting any large file i.e as Wimpie stated above - flash games or movies, music etc...

If i can help anymore feel free to give us a shout :)

Mike.

[ravenfire]

Hi Mike. The company Im talking about is 4uhosting.co.uk. I only have awstats on the site at the moment so I think maybe I need to get something else to give me a better idea as to whats going on as I dont know with that what files are requested. I do have an arcade on the site and because so much bandwidth has been used this month and Im worried about whether or not I have enough I have turned the arcade off for now! I have been pretty busy on the site this month but even so with 10gb I thought I would have plenty but dont!!!!

Can you recommend any good stat counters?

Thanks

Toni

[MikeC]

Ive been slightly nosey now into this company and personally from reading what people have been saying i would have been out of there. I have added the links below to a few places you might want to read :)

http://www.findspforums.com/showthread.php?t=15081
http://www.sculptex.co.uk/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=10
http://hosthideout.com/showthread.php?t=11808

Awstats should really be more than adequate to show which files are being accessed - If you go to your sidebar in the stats - then Navigation - then Files Type or Viewed this will show you the most accessed file types and top 25 accessed files. Let us know if you find it ok :)

[ravenfire]

Thanks for that Mike.

[MikeC]

no problem, hope it helped.