Hosting Reminders

[admin]

Please understand that we provide this service at such a low cost (at a heavy loss actually) as a reward to those FreePgs users that have stuck with us over the years.

Please understand what this hosting does not offer:

-Backups

It has always been your responsibility as a user of FreePgs to keep your own backups of your sites/files/databases.

While we are able to recover most of the files from the crashed Plesk4 server's hard drive, we do not have a working Plesk database and that is why we are asking you to provide what domains you had.  (Once you provide that information, it is very likely that the domain(s) can be recovered.

When using sites with databases, be sure to keep a regular backup of the database dump file (*.sql file) so you always have a way to restore databases.  This crash has caused any InnoDB tables to be lost, however, most of the MyISAM tables are intact (which is what most applications create).

-Phone Support

Operating a low cost service does not permit much technical support.  The only option you have with our service is email support.



Things we do offer that only a few subscribers are using

-Ability to host SSL websites

In the past, these were limited because it used to require a dedicated IP address for each one of these sites.  With the newer versions of Apache and Plesk, you can now have multiple SSL sites sharing a single address.


-Choice of servers

We have servers in 2 general locations to attempt to provide users with the best experience.





Things that will be changing:

-We are needing to do some cleanup in order to keep this service running.  We must consolidate the plesk7 server customers with the new "west" server.  We setup the plesk7 server as a replacement to Plesk4, but found a few issues, so most never were migrated over.

The new "west" server offers 4x the CPU power, 2x the memory, and at least 2x the disk capacity and I/O bandwidth compared to the original Plesk4 machine.  Any user that is closer to this "west" server can request to be migrated over, even if their account is on Plesk5/Plesk6.

Keep in mind all new servers are running PHP 5.3.x.  Some compatibility issues arise with some scripts developed using depreciated functions.  These functions for the most part continued to work with PHP 5.2.x, but a good portion of them were finally dropped in 5.3.x and 5.4.x versions.



Our original plans had us replacing both Plesk5 and Plesk6 with a new single server, however, due to the number of users that have had problems with PHP 5.3.x, we may have to keep at least one of the machines running 5.2.x around for a bit longer.

If we are unable to bring the money I contribute to keep this service running down significantly, we will be forced to do another rate increase.  I spend on average $7,000 to 10,000 per year of my own money to keep this service up and running.  This amount is in excess of money collected.



If we do have another rate increase, we will be increasing the minimum amount of disk space offered on the accounts and may rethink the way we allow more disk space instead of using a one-time fee, change to a tiered annual fee approach, that way if you maintain an account with a 5GB quota, you will be paying more per year than someone subscribing to the 2GB plan.

We will also revisit the idea of handling billing in a central system instead of relying on Plesk to send alerts that your dates are nearing their expiration.

[admin]

Updates

west.lvcs.net

-Updated default /var/lib/php/session (default session.save_path) for proper write access when using FastCGI
--This allows sessions to work without having to specify your own session.save_path in the PHP Settings tab of your site.

[pixie]

We will also revisit the idea of handling billing in a central system instead of relying on Plesk to send alerts that your dates are nearing their expiration.

Thank you.  I can't ever remember when or how to pay!