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PHP Version?
Hello community, this post is born from the mere curiosity to know how many have had the same luck as me.
I'm actually hoping I'm not the only one unlucky enough to have bought a barely working shared account from RN's new year deals. At the prices they were offered it was obvious and expected they were oversold (photo attached) but the truth is that in In the 20 years that I have been using hosting services and managing servers myself, I have never seen a server so badly configured or with so many issues. First month everything was excellent, to the point I decided to upgrade to the Shared200 plan that offered the best performance. So far so good. Then suddenly one day out of nowhere all my domains on the server began to throw 503 errors (thank heavens it happened on a weekend causing no trouble with my clients), so after spending all night talking with ticket support, loading several backups and testing hundreds of configurations, I managed to get them to solve the problem, obviously they never recognized any responsibility, they only limited themselves to apply patch solutions that 3 months after the event continue to generate issues and problems. They changed my permissions, changed the php version, they limited my ability to change the php version and its modules, at one point they even set all my domains to php 7.4
PHP SEVEN POINT FOUR FOR CHRIST SAKE, IT'S 2023 XD!!!
Currently I have given up, every time I need to make a domain work I have to send a ticket, and I didn't buy a hosting plan to be sending tickets every day, a server is supposed to work, that's the idea of using cpanel right?
I do much better with virtualmin in a 100% self-managed VPS.
I must admit that the support team responds promptly, but unfortunately I think they are not capable of maintaining their own servers, I still have problems with the sites that I have not moved out from RN, but at this point the hosting is practically useless since I never know when or what is going to fail next. Being the server is oversold it seems difficult for me to be the only one with this problem
Now, as I was saying; yes, I was expecting a somewhat over-sold server, but if my plan is entitled to 200GBs and as can be seen in the attached image, the server only has 185GBs left, and I have only used 5GBs, what would happen if suddenly I decide to use my remaining 195GBs?
I'm not that naive as to believe that I am the only user who has used his account to less than 10%, and the truth is I never planned to use all the capacity, I only expected a hosting that worked, and even that they were not been able to deliver
Please, if anyone has gone through the same, I would appreciate it if you share your experiences here!
Comments
@dustinc
Hi @cexoxa -- Thank You for this post (we always value open discussion, and I'm sure other shared/reseller hosting customers of ours within this community will comment soon). Transparency is important to us, so I'd like to offer some context on how we operate and troubleshoot issues in the nature of our shared hosting product line.
Firstly, when it comes to PHP versions, we support all the way from PHP 5.6 to latest PHP 8.x. Some clients opt to update their website to PHP 8.x but then encounter incompatibility issues with their plugins or code that have not yet been updated to support PHP 8.x (you'll be surprised how many tickets we receive per day like this). Therefore, setting PHP to version 7.4 has often solved such issues. It's a common troubleshooting step, especially in shared hosting environments, for our support team to recommend switching to PHP 7.4. Why? Because in 80-90% of these cases, making that switch clears up the problem (at least until the customer updates their code/plugins to support the latest versions of PHP, after which it can be changed back). But let me be crystal clear: For those who are savvy enough, you have complete control over your PHP settings, both via cPanel's MultiPHP Manager and CloudLinux's PHP Selector on a per domain basis, to tailor the environment to your specific needs. This is not something you need to interact with our support team for in order to update/change, but we're always happy to help. Also, just to add - if you don't want to use CloudLinux's PHP selector you'll want to go to cPanel's MultiPHP Manager and select an ea-php* version, whereas the alt-php* versions are for CloudLinux's PHP selector which you can customize further.
Performance is something that we take very seriously. Our shared hosting platform has garnered an excellent reputation for performance, something we're quite proud of. Disk usage in shared hosting environments will naturally fluctuate, especially given the dynamic nature of website requirements and backend processes. All of our shared hosting servers run on hot-swap chassis, providing flexibility to add additional SSD drives when necessary. A common reason is that it can be occupied by temporary staging folders used by JetBackup during the daily backup process prior to it being transferred over to Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. This does fluctuate and is actively monitored 24x7 by our server health team. Should additional storage become a necessity, we will coordinate with the datacenter to add the needed storage, seamlessly and without any downtime (WHM provides a way to segregate accounts to different home directories easily). We've been running our shared hosting infrastructure in this manner for many years without any issues - and we've found it provides a great balance, as it ultimately allows our end users to utilize their service without having to worry about maintaining or monitoring the underlying infrastructure.
If you're open to it, I would appreciate the opportunity to discuss this matter further. Please feel free to e-mail me at [email protected] with a way that I can look up your account (such as a ticket ID), that way, I can make personalized suggestions moving forward here.
yes! I'm on same node, and my WP pages were giving out 503 error code suddenly one day as I was swtiched to PHP 8. The support guy swtiched it back to 7.4 version. Now my sites load more fast (as on other racknerd node with E3 Intel) as this run on turbo mode of 4.50GHz. Except that I didn't felt any other problem.
I'll see if I can swtich to PHP 8 when I update plugins/themes. hope this problem will not arise as its not racknerd related as Dustin has pointed in his reply.
Interesting definition of scam lol. PHP upgrades can cause issues, not a provider issue IMO.
I also faced similar issues but then I updated my code to stop using ancient depreciated PHP code and learned a thing or two.
If we were talking about fully managed services then maybe the provider would be liable but AFAIK Racknerd deals are strictly unmanaged.
Dustin just summed it up perfectly.
Ditto @dahartigan -- you'd be surprised how many tickets we receive per day regarding PHP 8.x upgrade subjects
Deprecated PHP code, language/function changes, third party plugins not coded to support PHP 8.x, outdated themes, and so on. We truly don't mind helping/troubleshooting, but I just want to again emphasize our customer's do have full control with regards to changing PHP versions - we even offer ability to switch between cPanel's MultiPHP and CloudLinux PHP Selector. Sometimes, it's not a matter of the end user intentionally switching over to PHP 8.x either, as by default our cPanel servers do deploy with PHP 8.x so if they have deprecated code that they don't wish to update, then they need to use MultiPHP Manager to switch to an older version of PHP.
There are several curveballs too, such as PHP 8.0 not supporting ioncube but PHP 8.1 does, etc.
As you pointed out, our services are by default unmanaged. With shared hosting, a bit more support is included as we manage the underlying infrastructure and whatnot - making our shared hosting product line a good fit for those who are not extremely tech savvy but know their way around cPanel/FTP etc. I like to say we are server admins, not web developers, so we always do our best to help point our customers in the right direction. At the end of the day, we're all human, so we don't mind going the extra mile (within reason).
I think you are running some old programs which are not compatible with later versions of PHP 8. This produces errors and affects performance. Usually switching to PHP 7.4 is the easiest and most effective solution.
After all, the provider cannot help you upgrade the code.
racknerd is the best!