I've been having a lot of issues with my shared host lately – from long load times to 504 errors and timeouts. I tried to contact gosthator (intentionally altered to avoid any further issues) to see what they could do for me.

Long story short, their support is horrid – and it's not just me. Their forums are piled high with complaints about how crappy their support and service is. I tried contacting them to see why I was encountering so many issues with my website, and the CSR was completely oblivious and not very knowledgeable. They couldn't give me a logical reason why and tried telling me it was Composr's fault, basically. They said the software was probably too intensive for their servers and couldn't handle the shared load, and because I "probably have too much traffic".

What's quite comical is (and I even told them this), I'm really the only user on my site as of now while my company is in its development stage (apart from Chris from time-to-time to inspect my bug reports). I informed them that if my site runs this horribly with just one user accessing it, I could only imagine what it'd be like if I had 5,000+ users. However, they advised I go dedicated. Now mind you, their dedicated servers are outrageously priced.

I decided to go with another provider, which offered a great deal for a realistic price. I'm glad to say that the migration was successful and DANG my website is so fast! Now I can continue with production without falling asleep watching the loader spin. I'm just waiting on DNS to propagate my nameserver changes and then I have to transfer over the SSL certificates. But it went much smoother than I thought it would, so far.

Moral of the story is – I highly recommend going dedicated if you have (or plan to have) a busy site with a lot of traffic. It's awful being on a shared server with thousands of other people hogging up all the resources, and being a customer to a company that has horrible support.

Once my company gets itself off the ground, I plan on creating a website driven by Composr users, tailored FOR Composr users. The site will offer mods, themes, and many other customizations. And possibly offer some hosting at some point – but this would be in the distant future. Composr is the best CMS software out there, and I'll definitely continue to use it for years to come.

Well done. Yeah, the vast majority of shared hosts are cancer, especially the big names. We used to 'recommend' hosts to people, but every single time we found a good one, within a few years they'd been bought out and became terrible.

I have been  using a particular shared host for two years now and a;though I have sen some old bad reviews on it, I personally haven't had any service or customer care issues - it isn't a big name and personally I tend to stay away from big names, they are usually overpriced.
While a good number of shared hosts may be bad, everyone can't use dedicated servers or VPS -for example a blogger who doesn't want to go into technical server administration.
 

enelson said

I have been  using a particular shared host for two years now and a;though I have sen some old bad reviews on it, I personally haven't had any service or customer care issues - it isn't a big name and personally I tend to stay away from big names, they are usually overpriced.
While a good number of shared hosts may be bad, everyone can't use dedicated servers or VPS -for example a blogger who doesn't want to go into technical server administration.
 

From “Post #5253”, 27th Feb 2019

Well said. Smaller ones are often run by passionate people still, who are skilled and want to give good service.

Is there a way to prevent this message from showing up at the top of my screen in AdminZone?

Neither the iconv nor mbstring PHP extensions are available. This may lead to some bugs processing non-English languages.

These extensions don't really affect me since my website is only one language, but this error is a bit annoying.

Hi,

If someone posts some non-English text as part of (for example) a forum post, it could affect you. The specific language pack of another language doesn't need to be installed.

If you want to remove it you could delete sources/hooks/systems/checks/utf.php.

Or just install the package. If you're on a Fedora based distribution it's probably something very simple like this on the server command shell…

Chris, I tried this but it said no package php_mbstring available, so I did some research –

I had to do it from within WHM's EasyApache 4 settings, but now the error is gone – so thank you Sir!