When is it time to give up on your existing web host? I am sure we all have experienced some sort of downtime or server slowness. Either our website would not come up at all or if it would come up it would be horribly slow. Over the years I had plenty of occasions where I wondered what was going on. As an example many years ago I was hosting a very popular forums website. I actually owned the website and it had its own dedicated server because of the resource requirements the website had. And then one day it just stopped loading. I would have called the web host, but since that was me that excuse did not work.

I fired up Putty (an SSH client) and tried to connect to my web server and the server responded – slow, but it responded. Earlier inside the web browser I did not even get an error message, so this was motivating. I logged in and starting looking around running top command and also looking at different logs. The web server was bogged down from hundreds of incoming page requests … hundreds per second. The log files showed a certain footprint and so I started searching the Internet for the footprint. I found the issue within moments. Back then the forum was using the popular, but open source software phpBB and apparently there was a vulnerability that allowed attackers to hack a server. However, under certain circumstances the attacks failed and I was lucky to have this situation. I had hacked some additional functionality into the Open Source Software which took the vulnerability out of commission. Lucky me, but why was my server down? Well, the hostile requests came from a bot network randomly scanning the Internet and once it found a phpBB forum it attacked. So, my server was going down under the heavy load of requests. Fortunately I found a way to disable the attack by putting a custom firewall filter into place that blocked the attacks before it even reached the website.

Anyway, the headline of this article raises the question when to quit on your web host? In my case the slowness or downtime was caused by external issues and I was able to address them after doing some research. If you are on a shared web hosting account you have very little control over the web server and you do not know who else is hosted on the same web server. When you are experiencing issues it is important to investigate what the problem might be. Once you open a ticket with your web host, supply as much information about the problem as possible. Then, afterwards, collect information from the web host about the problem and the resolution. Keep track of these things if you start experiencing more and more downtime or server slowness. Eventually take screenshots that support your case and submit it to the web host with your next ticket.

Some web hosts are known to over-load their servers and there is not much you can really do about it other than leave. But most web hosts actually do care about their customer experience and they want to know when there are issues so that they can address them. A well supported ticket helps your web host to research a problem and to address it appropriately. Here is an example of mine where this actually worked out just fine. Besides using a dedicated server for some of my own websites I also lease web hosting space with a so-called reseller account. A reseller account is like a wholesale web hosting package – you become your own web host within the resources you have purchased. The server I was on hosted about 30 websites of mine and was very slow and so I submitted a ticket. The problem was addressed promptly, but a few days later the same issue popped up again. Again, it was fixed just to appear again a few days later. So, I grabbed the information from the previous tickets and added it to the newest ticket. The web host was able to identify an recurring issue on a website of a different customer. That person was running a recurring job (cronjob) that brought the server down to its knees. The web host identified the process and disabled it. That other customer was friendly reminded about being in a shared web hosting environment and that certain web processes are not suited for such an environment, but rather require a VPS or even a dedicated server.

As you can see there is no one answer that will tell you when to look for a new web host. Do some research before making a sudden decision like moving on to a new web hosting provider. Moving a website is sometimes more painful and difficult than talking to your existing web host.

This article was written by the owner of the Web Hosting Resource Kit website. Web Hosting Resource Kit is an informational website providing web hosting tutorials as well as web hosting reviews.