BackupBuddy: Hosts

From IThemes Codex

The information contained here is for shared hosting accounts unless specified otherwise. Some hosts include a letter grade next to them as a quick reference score of how well they perform.

Contents 1 1and1 2 aPlus.net 3 BlueHost 3.1 Timeouts 4 BlueRazor 5 Dreamhost - D (maybe F) 6 GoDaddy - F 7 HostGator A 8 InMotionHosting 9 iPower 10 ipowerweb 11 Rackspace Cloud Hosting 12 JustHost

1and1

• Servers sometimes overloaded causing browsing sites hosted on them to take a very long time to load or time out.

aPlus.net

Issues

• Problems reported with sites above 450mb (with zip compression on; off increases limit).

BlueHost

Overall BlueHost hosting seems to be somewhat hit or miss. Many customers have found that BlueHost is slow and often returns 404 and 500 server error messages for no reason periodically. These can not only cause a bad experience for viewers of your site but also break BackupBuddy backup functionality. Though in general BackupBuddy should work the lack of consistency among the experiences of users of this host results in us not being able to recommend this host.

PHP memory limit is 128MB at MOST. This is low. Hostgator for example provides 256MB which is double.

• One customer had an Addhandler line in .htaccess which gave issues when migrated to another host.

Bluehost requires a database name (and user) to have a prefix of your username, so to be of the form username_databasename.

Timeouts

On the boards, a few people have complained about BackupBuddy timing out during backup. To resolve this, support recommends editing your php.ini file to change max execution time to 600.

According to response from tech support these are the limits on how long a process can run before being killed off and are based on whether the customer has a dedicated IP address or uses the shared address.

• Apache/Web (HTML/PHP/Downloads): With Dedicated IP: 12 Hours | Without: 10 Minutes (up from 5 minutes)
• SSH/Shell: With Dedicated IP: 2 Hours | Without: 1 Hour
• Cron Jobs: With Dedicated IP: 30 Minutes | Without: 30 Minutes
• Deamons: With Dedicated IP: Unlimited | Without: 10 Minutes

BlueRazor

No cPanel

Dreamhost - D (maybe F)

Issues

• Does not allow HTTP Loopbacks.
• Unlimited plans terms of service PROHIBITS storing of backups in your account. "Unlimited" is not truly unlimited.
• Extremely slow.
• No cPanel (uses custom system)
• No native command-line zip. BackupBuddy will enter the slower, less reliable compatibility mode.
• Problems reported with sites above 22mb (with zip compression on; off increases limit) due to slow processing.
• Procwatch automatically kills off BackupBuddy if it uses too many resources in the process of making a backup.
  • Can create a custom php.ini to extend PHP timeout to increase BackupBuddy run-time.

Resources

• File Manager (allows for manual unzipping): https://webftp.dreamhost.com/

GoDaddy - F

Issues

• Custom control panel. Some changes take up to hours to take effect.
• Slow site load times on some servers.
• Some servers overloaded not leaving processing power for backups.
• System actively kills any PHP process working too hard or too long (ie backups).

HostGator A

Benefits

• Fast. Command-line zip available for best BackupBuddy experience.
• CPanel.
• Top technical support.

Issues

• Recently changed PHP runtime limit cap to 30 seconds for shared hosting.
  • Possible work-around: http://ithemes.com/forum/index.php?/topic/5519-hostgator-timeout-fix-available/
  • Only causes issues with large sites ( ~1GB or more )

Info

• Current limits of their shared and reseller hosting (9/20/2011)
  • safe mode = Off (cannot adjust)
  • memory_limit = 64M (MAXIMUM)
  • max_execution_time = 30 (MAXIMUM)
  • max_input_time = 60 (MAXIMUM)
  • post_max_size = 64M (MAXIMUM)
  • upload_max_filesize = 64M (MAXIMUM)
  • enable_dl = Off (cannot adjust)

InMotionHosting

• Slow page loads.
• Problems reported with sites above 85mb (with zip compression on; off increases limit).

iPower

Minimal issues.

Told a customer that they don't support linux command line zip.

ipowerweb

Minimal issues.

Rackspace Cloud Hosting

• Currently fails path/directory detection preventing backups.
• We are working with Rackspace to try and get this issue resolved.

JustHost

• JustHost blocks the command line ZIP command which is required for BackupBuddy's normal functionality.
• Compatibility mode is available but is only recommended for moving away from JustHost hosting.