UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Programming Web Hosting Tera-Byte Experience

I visited the forums today to look for a particular smilie, but while scanning the list I noticed the Web Hosting forum and felt I had to post my experience with Tera-Byte.

I haven't visited this forum in a while, not since I asked for recommendations for webhosts in December of 2000. One of the recommendations was for Tera-Byte. They seemed very reasonable with 100MB/10GB for about $100/year, so I went with them.

And boy was I happy. I had no previous webhosting experience, but between their help pages and a little phone help I was able to set up my website. Things went very well for a long time.

Then suddenly this past March the database files for threads and forums starting getting corrupted or reduced to 0 bytes. I spent lots of time rebuilding thread databases, restoring from backup and apologizing to members, and lots more time perusing and testing the code trying to figure out what was going wrong. Got nowhere.

Then it suddenly hit me. The CGI processes were dying in mid stream! I called Tera-Byte and my suspicions were confirmed. Without telling a soul, they had imposed CPU and virtual memory limits on all shared hosting accounts.

I was very upset. It's not that I don't think they have the right to do this. In fact, it's a necessity. What upset me was that they didn't tell anyone.

And they were antagonistic when I mentioned how unhappy I was. Gone was all the kind helpfulness via email and phone. I was using the dreaded UBB software from InfoPop, and if my processes were being killed it was my own fault, I should rewrite the code to be more efficient, and I should switch to MySQL. Yeah, right, in my spare time. I asked for my money back for the current 6-month period (I had just renewed a few weeks before), and when they declined I filed a complaint with the Edmonton BBB.

So I switched from Tera-Byte to ValueWeb. For about $240/year you get 200MB/10GB. I'm not happy about the higher cost, but I had to switch fast and didn't have time for a lengthy investigation.

I should mention I'm still at version 5.7c. I *did* make one significant software change to improve performance to CreateThreadHTMLWork in ubb_library2.pl that makes it far more efficient with respect to virtual memory if anyone's interested.

I haven't been keeping up with version 6 because it would be so hard for me to switch what with all the special features I've added (if anyone's curious it's at http://www.evcforum.net, the significant added features are numbering of messages, tracking of who's replied to which message, lists of messages by member, breakdowns of threads by message, message preview), but I expect I'll be looking into it one of these days.

Thanks for listening!

--Percy
 EvC Forum Administrator

I was at TeraByte for a very short time as well, and they were bad from the start. www.digitalprinceton.net has some UUB specials coming up. They have been great in the months that I've been with them.

Strange, I've been with tera-byte for a year now (a year and two days to be exact). I've been amazed at the prices and the support they offered me. Now, I probably don't have as active of a message board as XPerT or Percipient, so the server strain could be the problem. But I've had to request support a number of times, all with great repsonses (not to mention within minutes of when I sent the email).

The only problem I've had is something that everybody does, make mistakes. I changed the credit card number, and they filed it, but forgot to re-activate my site. But it was all settled and I got a free month of hosting because of their mistake.

~Jon

Hi Jon,

My message board isn't too active, perhaps 50-100 messages/day. I don't know about Version 6, but for Version 5 the problem shows itself when writing the thread HTML files. Once the number of pages of a thread exceeds around 20 you'll start to have problems because you'll be exceeding virtual memory limits.

But if it were just an inability to render long threads it wouldn't be a big problem. The problem is severe only because Tera-Byte also imposed a limit on total CPU usage of 25%, so whenever two or more people are posting at the same time and one of the threads is long you can easily exceed this limit, and when the processes are killed the result is zeroed out thread files, zeroed out member registration files, and garbled forum thread summaries.

Tera-Byte is great until you receive the "Server Abuser" classification. They also have pretty severe bookkeeping problems, as you found with your credit card problems. I experienced something nearly identical, but that wasn't the worst incident. At one point I upgraded my plan and changed servers, and after about six months they realized they forgot to delete the copy of the site on the old server. So they deleted it, except they made a mistake and deleted the active site on the new server. Oops!

So I called and alerted them and restored my site from backup, but without telling me they also restored my site from backup later that afternoon, but their backup was six months old from the old server. Oops again!

I call that day Black Wednesday.

Another problem with Tera-Byte is lack of migration path. For those whose site grows past the basic shared hosting plans priced around $100-200/year, the next step up is virtual hosting at around $750/year.

Nobody's perfect, and I don't think there's a perfect webhosting company out there, but some are more professional than others. For as long as I had a good relationship with Tera-Byte I thought they were great, even after the accidental deletion. What upsets me is that they imposed the limits without telling their customers, then compounded things by blaming me for the problems they caused.

--Percy
EvC Forum Administrator