Afrihost Web Hosting Useless

AdrianH

AdrianH

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Hi

Your Windows shared hosting is a joke as if a website is idle for 20 minutes, it gets shut down as nobody accessed it. It then takes on average of 30 seconds to reload the website when a user browses to the website.

This information took me 7 days to get out of your support personnel, probably because they don't know what they are doing. Upon requesting they change this, Mark says they can't do this. He also made some comment about I should re-develop my website. Professional indeed!

Your telephonic support is pretty useless as well, been holding on in excess of 10 minutes waiting for your support staff to take my call. All I want to know is how do I transfer my domain names from Afrihost to Mweb.

Regards
Adrian
 
Im using their cloud servers with debian...radius server with a VPN into it...very light traffic hitting the box. VPN drops like 40 times a day... I wonder if this relates to the same problem you having. Is there a hosting rep on MyBB for afrihost ?
 
Dunno so much - I'm hosting my site with them and "touch wood" no problem so far...

Google webmaster tools only showed 2 errors in the last 2 months.
But my line is going for a ball of dwang today.
 
AdrianH said:
Hi

Your Windows shared hosting is a joke as if a website is idle for 20 minutes, it gets shut down as nobody accessed it. It then takes on average of 30 seconds to reload the website when a user browses to the website.

This information took me 7 days to get out of your support personnel, probably because they don't know what they are doing. Upon requesting they change this, Mark says they can't do this. He also made some comment about I should re-develop my website. Professional indeed!

Your telephonic support is pretty useless as well, been holding on in excess of 10 minutes waiting for your support staff to take my call. All I want to know is how do I transfer my domain names from Afrihost to Mweb.

Regards
Adrian
Click to expand...

This is standard .NET behaviour, it's not Afrihost's fault. Any .NET developer could tell you that.
 
If you have access to IIS you can set the application pool it uses idle timeout to 0 so it doesn't timeout.
If this a shared server with lots of app pools and websites it is probably better to keep the setting on so you don't have so many worker processes chewing up memory.

When you reload the website and it takes 30 seconds it because the pages have to be compiled as you are the 1st person who accessed it. To stop this you can look into precompilcation so you deploy your site precompiled instead of having the first user who hits it after a restart having to wait for each page to be compiled as they navigate your site
 
skimread said:
If you have access to IIS you can set the application pool it uses idle timeout to 0 so it doesn't timeout.
If this a shared server with lots of app pools and websites it is probably better to keep the setting on so you don't have so many worker processes chewing up memory.

When you reload the website and it takes 30 seconds it because the pages have to be compiled as you are the 1st person who accessed it. To stop this you can look into precompilcation so you deploy your site precompiled instead of having the first user who hits it after a restart having to wait for each page to be compiled as they navigate your site
Click to expand...

Yes, it took 7 days before somebody at support seemed to understood what I was trying to tell them regarding timeouts on the app pool, but I don't have access to change it and they refused.

I don't know if precompilation will solve the delay problem as I don't think the site is being recompiled after every timeout, merely just being reloaded into the worker process which takes time. Either way, having to wait 30 seconds after each timeout to load the default page is really rubbish.
 
This is the first time I have heard of such a thing... Learn something new every day.
 
deweyzeph said:
This is standard .NET behaviour, it's not Afrihost's fault. Any .NET developer could tell you that.
Click to expand...

Its actually nothing to do with .NET but the configuration of IIS app pools. IIS does not only run .NET web applications, but CGI and standard html web sites as well. I even have a web service written in Delphi 7 running on IIS 7.5 and using the good old isapi.dll module :)

Unfortunatly I don't have access to IIS on their server so I couldn't see the setting for the app pool. I have continually asked Afrihost support for the configuration settings to confirm my suspicion that the idle timeout was causing the issue, but only today (the call was logged on the 20th November) could somebody tell me the settings. They refuse to change them though. I could always run a service from home that will ping (do a HTTPRequest) against a small page in the site every 10 minutes, that will stop the site from sleeping.

Not a problem though, I'll just move to MWeb.
 
Last edited:
You will get the same problem with Mweb.

Your solution is to deploy your asp.net site precompiled.
 
skimread said:
You will get the same problem with Mweb.

Your solution is to deploy your asp.net site precompiled.
Click to expand...

I tried your suggestion, unfortunately it took 23 seconds to load initially. Still not satisfactory.
 
AdrianH said:
I tried your suggestion, unfortunately it took 23 seconds to load initially. Still not satisfactory.
Click to expand...
Did you use the the command prompt and aspnet_compiler.exe?

Run
Code: 
aspnet_compiler -p "C:\MyDevelopment\Myaspnetwebsite" -v / C:\StagingAreaForDeployment
Then copy the whole folder from your staging area to your ISP
 
AdrianH said:
Hi

Your Windows shared hosting is a joke as if a website is idle for 20 minutes, it gets shut down as nobody accessed it. It then takes on average of 30 seconds to reload the website when a user browses to the website.

This information took me 7 days to get out of your support personnel, probably because they don't know what they are doing. Upon requesting they change this, Mark says they can't do this. He also made some comment about I should re-develop my website. Professional indeed!

Your telephonic support is pretty useless as well, been holding on in excess of 10 minutes waiting for your support staff to take my call. All I want to know is how do I transfer my domain names from Afrihost to Mweb.

Regards
Adrian
Click to expand...

I'm really sorry to hear you had such a poor experience with us. We try to verse all our support guys in all the products we offer, but the intricacies of hosting can be pretty complex, and I can imagine this can be difficult.

I saw in a later post you mentioned you'd prefer to move away. If you would be open to letting us have another crack at it, I would be happy to chat to our 2nd level support team and server admins to find out if there is any way we can accommodate your request.

Just drop me a PM :)
 
Yes, that is the command I ran. The deleted all the code on the hosted platform and copied from my compiled output folder.
 
skimread said:
Taking so long on 1st load precompiled then something isn't right.
Click to expand...

I am not sure what is wrong really.

The other issue I experienced is that refreshing the page loads between 1 - 8 seconds erratically. This happened over diginet, adsl and microwave links. Even Afrihost say they experienced erratic loading of the same page. The site only has one page and it is static. Doesn't even do anything. Doesn't make sense.

I would have actually been over the moon if the problem/issue was found, even if it was in my web application. At least then I could have either solved it or worked around it. The whole way the issue was handled has put my back up at this point though.

Anyway, Afrihost have cancelled my hosting account and I have already started the move to MWeb.

Thanks for the pre-compilation functionality, I never knew about this. I want to do some more investigation and maybe implement it here at work.
 
AdrianH said:
The other issue I experienced is that refreshing the page loads between 1 - 8 seconds erratically. This happened over diginet, adsl and microwave links. Even Afrihost say they experienced erratic loading of the same page. The site only has one page and it is static. Doesn't even do anything. Doesn't make sense.
Click to expand...
Sounds like Afrihost windows hosting is really bad and probably overloaded. I would avoid them especially if their support cannot give you a reason for a static page having erratic load times.

You could also try a cloud based host like microsoft azure. You can then compare mwebs/afrihost performance to yoursite.azurewebsites.net you created to see how they compare before you decide to go with them and move domain. Azure requires you CC card number on registration but don't charge you during the trial and they also have a free usage tier if your domain is not linked to them.
 
Precompiled not actually the problem here.

skimread said:
You will get the same problem with Mweb.

Your solution is to deploy your asp.net site precompiled.
Click to expand...

I don't agree with this statement at all, yet I do agree that loading of a pre-compiled web app will be faster than a source app.

I've had 1st-hand experience with Afrihost web-hosting and how they manage their application pools. Basically their management of it is just bad. With better management of this you would barely notice the difference in loading speed between the same app in both pre-compiled and source state, depending on the complexity of the app, of course.

A beautiful example of their terrible management of this is when one of the sites on one of the Afrihost web servers was badly coded and resulted in the Jet 4 data access component crashing due to too many open connections, which affected EVERY site using these in that pool, including two of my clients' sites. After days of Afrihost trying to pass the buck to me about my development skills (nice of them) I eventually managed to get through the thick skull of one of the "technical" people there and told them how to fix it.
To my surprise they actually implemented that solution, and no problems were had for a few months afterwards.

Those websites are no longer with Afrihost, after a score of other problems with them - so I suggest you bail on them ASAP, definitely not worth all that stress.

There is still one client of mine who didn't follow my advice and stayed with Afrihost. Their site, along with a few others were hacked earlier this month. Afrihost reported that the hack took place on an older server "with less security", and that the hacker exploited a "CMS Component" on my client's website.
Strange that, as that website is not a CMS site.

You decide, but if you want advice I'd say RUN.
 
I think the lesson is for business hosting stay away from small ISPs and small virtual resellers. Rather go cloud or large hosting provider.
 
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