The Website Saga -...

When working with 000webhost, I began experiencing some problems. Small ones at first, and then the problems got a little more severe.

Although CMS Made Simple installed fine on my 000webhost account, and I managed to get pretty urls working, I was experiencing sporadic problems with not being able to load the page (404 errors, timeouts, etc)... and sometimes database connection issues with the site.  They would normally last a couple of minutes and then I would have access to my site again.  Also, it was slow, and I attribute that to their remote mysql server.  I think it was overloaded.   But the package was free, and this was just for experimentation for now, so I just let it go.

TinyMCE was also giving me a problem. There were no toolbars at all. Some quick investigation using the "view source" menu option showed me that although there were no ads, 000webhost put some analytic/tracking type javascript at the bottom of every page. The Firefox error console quickly showed me javascript errors on any page trying to use TinyMCE. This was a problem.

I contacted Silmarillion and because this was still a beta version of CMS Made Simple, we set about fixing the problem. The problem was that the tinyconfig.php script was messing up when trying to output the configuration information for Tiny. Sil solved this by adding an option to create a static config file for tiny in the tmp directory. Woot, I was on my way, and this problem would be solved in perpetuity because the changes were committed to the SVN Repository.

I then started the blogging process, and was merily going on my way. But I had life commitments so I had to stop for the day. It's the next day that I noticed problems.

I couldn't login to my site. I had purchased and parked calguy1000.com with 000webhosting, and I couldn't get there all of a sudden. I couldn't even ping the host. However, I could get to 000webhost's technical support/control panel thingy. Their FAQ indicated that the problem could be with some wierd firewall rules on my ISP. So I followed their tips and tried a web proxy, and sure enough my site was there.

I contacted my ISP. Spent a good half hour on the phone with them, and they investigated saying that there were no firewall rules to prevent me from accessing that site. Infact, they could access it, but I couldn't. I then tried a couple of free traceroute websites, and they had no problems resolving the host. However, I could not find a route to the host. This was strangeness.

After a couple of hours of messaging back and forth between myself and the 000webhost support people, we decided that this was a strange mid-stream routing issue with a router somewhere in georgia or something. Either way there was nothing I could do about it.

While all of this was going on, I was discussing the problem with the regular people on the CMS IRC channel. They noted that they could get to the site, but that it was incredibly slow for them. Ted, our benevolent dictator, then offered to let me host the site on the same VPS that cmsmadesimple.org is hosted on. I jumped at the chance, and began the move.

I'll discuss the issues I had with the move in a later blog post, but I thought I would mention that the mid-stream routing issue with 000webhost seems to have been resolved, and I can now access the site again. It was down for like three or four days, and now works, though it is slow.

In conclusion I would just have to say this about 000webhost. You get what you pay for. Although CMS does work, and it is stable, it's slow. Their remote mysql servers seem to be overloaded, as well there is the javascript stuff that they append to the bottom of every page view. If I have an idea for a low traffic site that is hobby or family related or something, I would probably use them. But for something commercial, where uptime and performance are required I would think twice about a free or even "rediculously cheap" hosting package.