Now is a great time to be an affiliate of ThisWebHost, because we’ve just automated our affiliate payout system! You have the option of having your affiliate balance added to your ThisWebHost account and used for future invoices (including purchasing new hosting accounts), or you can have your money sent instantly to you via PayPal.

If you’re not an affiliate of us, why not? You will earn 10% recurring commission for everyone you refer to our service by giving them your unique referral link found within the affiliates section of the client area. You’ll earn 10% of every payment they make to us for their hosting account, for as long as they remain a customer of ours. There are no limits to how many people you can refer, and no limits on how much you can earn.

If you’re an existing customer of ours, simply click the ‘Affiliates’ button found within your client area. If you’re not a customer of ours but would like to promote our service, keep checking back and we’ll have some news for you soon.

As you should be able to see, we’ve finally launched our new website. Our aim was to have everything integrated and consolidated into a single place. One of the key things lacking from our previous design was a tightly integrated blog and client area. Navigating to any of these sections previously would mean you broke away from our main website and if you wanted to go back you’d have to manually re-enter the address into your browser’s address bar. Not ideal, by any means. Now everything has a main header navigation, so you can always reach any other part of the site, regardless of which page you’re currently on. Our client area has also been restyled and integrated into this design, so it no longer feels like an “external” site.

More after the jump.

(more…)

This post is a discussion post only. The changes mentioned within this blog post are intended to generate feedback from current and possibly new customers, and not guaranteed to be implemented in the future.

If you follow us on Twitter you may have seen our comments regarding the launch of the new site which we’d planned for last weekend. During that time, we’ve actually been testing some new server side technology which will allow us to far better manage the resource usage of accounts on our servers. After successful testing, we’ve decided to postpone the launch of our new website whilst we rework our packages yet again and get the infrastructure in place to handle the new changes.

Originally we’d planned to offer a selection of shared hosting packages, and split reseller hosting into its own category. Simply put, shared hosting packages would not have reseller access but would have unlimited/unmetered addon domains, subdomains etc and a scaling disk space and bandwidth allocation – much like we have right now. Resellers would have much bigger packages in terms of disk space and bandwidth, however the smallest package for this would be significantly higher than the shared hosting counterpart.

After the testing of the technology, and the impressive results that we’d seen, we’ve decided to revamp the packages for one final time. Instead of offering scaling shared hosting packages, we’ve decided to offer just two. The first package would be a ‘Starter/Blog’ package offering you a single website, no addon domains, no subdomains, but unmetered disk space and bandwidth. The second package would be a universal package, offering you any number of websites with unlimited addon domains, subdomains, and unmetered diskspace and bandwidth. Before you begin possibly panicking, let’s clear up a few things.

What is the new technology you’re talking about?
The new technology essentially allows us to control the CPU usage of individual websites and limit them accordingly. In short, this allows us to prevent a single account from consuming a massive amount of resources on the server and bringing everything else slowing to a crawl. To be clear, unlike some competitors who track the CPU usage and then respond by disabling your account after you consume a set number of resources within a period of time – this will instead limit the amount your acount can consume.

The limits we’ve tested are very healthy and will allow your website(s) to load just as quickly as they currently do.

Unmetered? Is that the same as Unlimited?
Not really. We don’t like using the term “unlimited” because it refers to something that has no limit. “Unmetered” on the other hand means there is a limit based on the physical limitations, however your actual usage of that resource is not tracked.

So, to be clear on this. Unmetered disk space – you are not limited to how much you can use on an account, but there is a limitation in the sense that disks can only store a certain amount of data. Unmetered bandwidth – you are not limited to how much you can use on an account, but there is a limitation on the connection attached to the server.

Why are you thinking of going unmetered?
As a hosting provider managing shared servers, the biggest and most valuable commodity on a server is CPU usage. Historically there has been no real method to control (in real-time) the usage of accounts from this perspective. You can track the usage and then let people know if it’s higher than you’d consider acceptable, but the usage could still have a huge affect on the server itself. An example of this would be if someone were to reach the front page of a social networking site – the CPU usage would escalate to the point where it could consume an entire server.

When selling shared hosting we need to take the CPU usage into consideration with the size of account packages that we offer. A bigger (Ultra) package with reseller access and many sub accounts is likely to consume more resources than a Starter/Blog package. It’s not set in stone, but it’s a fairly logical assumption. If we then are able to control the CPU usage of each account (which we can now do), the disk space and bandwidth become almost a non-issue entirely. If you’re using 20MB or 20GB of space, your CPU resource usage is what’s more important to us. Disk space and bandwidth are always something we can add more of – CPU usage is not. As a customer it can be very difficult to know just how much disk space or bandwidth your website requires. Now that the CPU usage is no longer a factor, why do you then need to make a choice?

Will there be any additional limits with unmetered disk space?
Yes, there will. Basically you will be limited on the number of files and folders within an account – and not the combined size of this content. The reason for this is that accounts with significantly high numbers of files and folders can dramatically slow down the backup process, even to the point where there account alone can take up to an hour or more to process. This clearly makes the backup process ineffective so something needs to be done about that.

The likely solution will be to remove the account(s) in question from the backup schedule. However, accounts that have a ridiculously high inode usage consumption will need to reduce this or move to a different hosting solution.

Is this definitely going to happen?
We would like it to yes, but we’d love to hear feedback from you. How do you feel about these possible changes? Please let us know.

What are the new packages going to look like?
We’ve discussed the shared hosting packages above. In terms of reseller packages, think something like our current shared hosting packages that scale in disk space and bandwidth. Exact figures will be released soon.

So will you be overselling?
No! With this new system, resources are controlled by the server in such a fashion that they are limited and will prevent users from consuming them to the point of causing an effect for others.

What will happen if my website hits this resource limit?
The limits we put in place will be very generous, but if your account hits the resource limit your website may begin loading more slowly. In very extreme cases, additional connections to your website will be dropped and an error message displayed. Please be aware that this is only in very extreme cases – and would only occur in periods of extreme activity (such as being on the front page of a social media website, etc).

Will you move existing clients to these new packages?
No. As always with any package changes we make, existing clients will remain on their existing packages. If you wish to upgrade or downgrade to one of our new offerings, you may do so by requesting this within the client area.

As some of you may be aware, usually we reboot our servers approximately once a month to apply the latest Kernel. This keeps everything up to date and patched against known security issues, as well as providing other essential bug fixes and possible performance enhancements. Now, we are utilising Ksplice which allows us to apply these security fixes on-the-fly, meaning we no longer need to reboot once a month in order to be patched.

What does this mean for you? No more downtime every month or so due to Kernel updates. Our uptime is already very good but now it’s going to be even better!

Much in line with our previous post on upcoming MySQL quotas, we’re always looking for ways to try and improve the quality of our hosting for everyone. One of the things we’re currently looking at is the CPU usage of accounts that we host. Currently, you should be aware that within our AUP we have a limit on the running time of processes. If they exceed 60 seconds (such as a badly coded script that may generate an infite loop) it will be terminated. We realise that there are many instances where a user may wish to run extended tasks that may take longer than 60 seconds to run, such as updating a shopping cart with inventory, or for uploading reasonably sized files. Under the current system these processes will likely be killed. Usually when this happens, some of you have noticed anomalies and have opened a ticket. Usually we’re very flexible with this and have added exceptions accordingly to ensure that your scripts work, but we’re looking at better solutions.

The key area we’re now looking at is daily CPU usage per account. This gives us a far more accurate representation of single site resource usage consumption, than on a per-process basis where you may have a very high period of activity, but not much happening for the rest of the day.

This is a very difficult topic to write about and discuss, since it effectively hits at the very heart of a topic which is essentially “Is my site fit for shared hosting?” Many hosting providers in the past have put limits in place on resource consumption, and whilst we don’t want to do that, we do need to have limits in place which provide a guideline we can use to determine when a site has exceeded shared hosting placement and needs its own dedicated set of resources.

At this*, as you should know, we don’t oversell our servers. This lets your sites run very well in all but the most extreme of conditions. Whilst we don’t oversell, given the nature of shared hosting, it’s simply not feasible for us to host websites which by their nature or by the mere traffic they receive, out-consume others by many many times. Out anti-overselling policies simply aren’t in place to allow very popular and active websites to “get by” on a shared hosting account without needing to upgrade to something that better suits them.

Many people may instantly jump to the conclusion that “If you need to take action, you must be overselling!”. That’s simply not the case at all. To throw an (extreme) analogy your way; if we deploy a brand new server and had a single account running on it that consumed approximately 60% of the load (permanently) – that’s most certainly a site that needs its own server. It’s not financially viable for us, or any other hosting provider out there, to maintain a website that large at the cost of shared hosting.

We’ve been monitoring accounts for the past few weeks, and we think we have a good idea of a guideline on CPU resource consumption in a “minutes per day” measurement. The sites that have currently exceeded our approximate guideline generate (on average) at least 750,000 hits (and in some cases much more) every day. We feel that’s certainly beyond what you would expect from a shared hosting account, and we’re happy that the guideline is “fair”. If we were to implement a guideline or “limit” on CPU minutes, we would not take immediate action on websites – such as a suspension or termination. Instead, we would notify the user and offer them an alternative solution, or at least make it clear that action needs to be taken, whether that’s a VPS or Dedicated solution with us (coming soon) or another provider. Our intention isn’t to disconnect anyone and leave them without their website. Your websites are important to us, and ultimately we want you to be in the best possible position.

To be clear, this isn’t a package issue. We’re more than happy for our lowest package users to use exactly the same amount of server resources (CPU and RAM) as our highest package users. This is fundamentally a Shared vs VPS/Dedicated issue.

We’re looking for your feedback on this subject. Do you believe what we’ve outlined is fair? Do you have any questions or suggestions on this topic?