Miscellaneous questions from potential new customer

[andy_c]

Hello,

I run a small hobbyist discussion forum that uses the Simple Machines Forum software, and am thinking about switching hosts either in late December or early January. At present, my forum takes up about 500 MB and has done a maximum of about 1.6 GB/month, but this is likely to grow somewhat next year. We have a small number of users and rather restricted membership. The plan I'm looking at is NexusOne.

These are newbie questions, as next year will be our second year of operation, so forgive me if I'm asking too-obvious questions. I'm familiar with cPanel, so I guess that's what I'd choose.

In looking through the blogs on this site, I saw one about database backup, and the proposed solutions seemed complex to me. Presently, I back up the forum files every day using FTP (very fast as it's an incremental backup). For the forum database, I go into cPanel and in the "Files" section, there's a "Backup" option. When I choose that, I get (among other things) a list of databases and I just click on the database name to back it up to my local drive. Very simple. Does the HostNexus cPanel also work this way? It's simpler to me than the techniques described in the blog.

Also, for proper SMF operations, I need to edit php.ini, which I presently do in cPanel on my current host ("php.ini quick configure"). I assume you have the same feature as well?

Regarding pricing, I saw "Monthly price based on yearly billing at a 10 monthly rate". I'm not sure what this means. The plan says $5.95 per month, so I assume this is a $59.95 payment in advance for ten months of service, correct?

The Christmas special information says, "25% off their first payment on ANY hosting plan at HostNexus". Does the $5.95 per month include the 25% discount, or is $5.95 per month the base price before the discount? Also, does this mean 25% off the first month, or 25% off the entire $59.95 up-front payment for the (assumed) 10-month period? If the latter, I'd probably sign up at the end of this month to take advantage of that.

Here's a question for any HostNexus users that may be reading this. My current host is HostGator, and one intermittent problem I've had concerns poor performance of MySQL on the shared plan. When it gets really bad, I get a "SMF could not connect to the database" error. Maybe this is users on the shared server abusing the system but going undetected. Anybody care to comment on how well their forum runs on a shared HostNexus plan?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

[NexDog]

Hi Andy,

Yes, you can use the cPanel option, no problem there. I just posted a way to backup databases only as it was convenient for me. You can edit files in cPanel in the File Manager.

Regarding pricing, I see how that might be confusing and I'll change the wording. It means the plan is available on yearly billing at a 10 monthly rate. So you are billed yearly at 10 x $5.95 ($59.95). This does not include the XMAS coupon so your first year works out to be around $45.

Hopefully someone can chime in about MySQL connectivity but I know we allow more concurrent database connections than HostGator. We are a smaller host and our servers have a lighter load in general.

[andy_c]

Originally Posted by NexDog

Regarding pricing, I see how that might be confusing and I'll change the wording. It means the plan is available on yearly billing at a 10 monthly rate. So you are billed yearly at 10 x $5.95 ($59.95). This does not include the XMAS coupon so your first year works out to be around $45.

That's a killer deal. Looks just right for our forum.

[NexDog]

Good stuff.

[RobbieLePommie]

Andy, I used to have a very busy forum pushing 14 gig a month transfer - although it's fired down a lot now. Never had db connectivity issues on the shared plan it was on. Three only thing that slowed it down was during backups - but that's a necessary part of hosting.

[andy_c]

Originally Posted by RobbieLePommie

Andy, I used to have a very busy forum pushing 14 gig a month transfer - although it's fired down a lot now. Never had db connectivity issues on the shared plan it was on. Three only thing that slowed it down was during backups - but that's a necessary part of hosting.

Something was seriously messed up with Hostgator in this regard, at least with the account I had. After one of my SMF updates, I set SMF up to email me when there was a database connectivity error, and after that I got hit with emails daily, sometimes several times per day. That's why I left. Even when there was no error message, sometimes I'd click on a forum name to open it, and there would be a 10-15 second delay before it actually opened up. I assume this was due to slow MySQL performance.

I've been with HostNexus since the first of the year and not a single database connectivity error message email, nor any such sluggishness opening up a forum when clicking on its name. Download of attachments does seem a bit slower on HostNexus, but that's easy to accept in return for snappy database performance. I'm a happy camper and paying less to boot.

[NexDog]

Glad to hear all is well.