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By Gerard McGarry on
I moved a site running Drupal 6 to a shared hosting account on Dreamhost. (Don't shout at me, it was a stop-gap measure!)
However, since the move, the site has been dogged with "Page Not Found" errors and "Internal Error" messages, mostly when posting new content, sometimes when just accessing content.
Now, I'm looking toward moving the site to a better host - that's a given. But what I need to know is, are these errors being caused by my site being on a shared hosting account, or is there a more Drupal-related reason for these problems. So, to sum up:
1) Could the "Page Not Found" errors be related to the shared hosting setup?
2) Can anyone recommend a good scalable host for a Drupal site receiving roughly 127,000 pageviews per month (and growing)?
Comments
Get a VPS
I have a VPS from ServInt for 49.00 / month and never looked back. Their support is awesome and you don't really have to know Apache or command line, they will help and advise you all the way.
http://www.servint.net/vps.php
You get a shared IP + 3 dedicated, Root access, Cent OS, Cpanel + WHM or Plesk and 30 GB space.
Danny Englander | Twitter | Instagram
The errors could be related
The errors could be related to shared hosting, but I doubt it. I have several Drupal sites running on Dreamhost servers and I haven't had any problems like that.
On the other hand, these are low-traffic sites. I think the Page Not Found problem is a separate issue, but I really can't speak to Dreamhost's capacity for high-traffic sites.
Thanks - I have a similar
Thanks - I have a similar situation, several low-volume sites running on Dreamhost no problems. The site I'm talking about above was on a Media Temple DV server alongside another of my more popular websites. However, I moved it because the Drupal site was hogging resources and bringing the server down repeatedly.
The site's running several regular Drupal modules - CCK, FileField, ImageField, ImageCache, WYSIWYG and things like that. They're all patched to the latest versions. Clearly I want to move away from Dreamhost if it's going to affect the site's growth, but I want to make the *right* move, rather than botch it and choose another inappropriate host!
Drupal and Dreamhost
GM, are you saying that you're currently getting 127K pageviews/mo on a Dreamhost shared account?
FWIW, I run several sites on a cheap, DH shared plan as well. They're low-traffic sites and I use caching options (though not yet Boost) so that should be fine. But recently, they'd all been having troubles: frequent 500 and 503 errors, admin pages refusing to load, repeated failure of operations like site database updates, etc. "Page Not Found" and "Internal Error" were especially common.
The issues didn't accompany any single Drupal version upgrade or other change; they'd simply been increasing over time.
I asked DH support for help, and they moved my account to a different MySQL server. That seemed to help a lot. Performance isn't perfect – the above problems still pop up at random – but it's about as good as I can expect for a cheap plan. As much as I try to make my sites easy on the server, there's just no telling what pain some other user may be causing a shared server at any given time. (FYI, I detail some older DH comments at http://www.drupalace.com/page_hosting_your_drupal_creations ).
Incidentally, one thing I did appreciate about the DH support (besides the speed of response, which has always been great for me) was that they told me honestly that my sites weren't the cause of any unusual burden on the server. It would have been a good chance for them to upsell a more expensive plan, telling me that my database-intensive Drupal sites needed more firepower, but they responded honestly. While I don't know about others, I've always had great experiences w/ their support.
In any case, your pageview numbers may be outgrowing even a well-run DH shared server. I hope to be there soon too! Would be interesting to hear what you choose for your next steps.
FWIW, I run ~ 3 pretty low
FWIW, I run ~ 3 pretty low traffic but views-intense sites on DH, and they've been throwing page-not-founds (irregularly) and 500 errors (also irregularly). I'm 98% sure it's not a Drupal problem, or a Dreamhost configuration problem (per se), as I've run these sites on DH Shared Hosting for a few years now. I'm used to the occasional downtime, but this is a new and more annoying iteration, and so far my tech interactions have been along the canned "your site was taking up too much RAM and the process got killed" line (my site has a viewership of somewhere around 3 people, so I somehow doubt this!).
Also, their Virtual Private Servers are significantly more stable (because you're paying for a chunk of ram to have for yourself, I presume)
http://drupal.org/node/213260
http://drupal.org/node/213260#comment-2120958 has suggestions on hacking a local php.ini to improve connections, and a DH tech recommended I use plain CGI instead of FastCGI
Switch away from FastCGI
I've been plagued with "Page not found" errors since I launched my Ubercart site four months ago on Dreamhost. It's a low traffic site but I would estimate that I would personally get a "Page not found" error for every 10 minutes or so of steady use (General admin stuff). Registered and anonymous users got it too. If a customer got the error when submitting the order they would press "back" or "reload" in their browser causing the order to be billed twice in PayPal. Very, very annoying.
Three days ago I switched from FastCGI to regular PHP 5.2 CGI in the Dreamhost domain settings. Neither myself or any users have had the error since even though there has been heavier than normal use on the site. I am really hoping this issue is fixed now.
FastCGI?
Thanks for reporting on this. My sites are behaving all right at the moment, but I'll keep it on hand as the first thing to try should trouble crop up again...
Fixed random "Page not found" errors
Thanks, this tip was immensely helpful in fixing the random errors. I switched to PHP 5.3 CGI and the problem seems to have gone away.
could it be related to php5 and drupal
am experiencing these errors myself and am beginning to think its related to drupal and php 5, i don't think it has anything to do with website capacity or the because i get it on fresh drupal installs
there are others who seem to suggest its mod_security and suphp
anyway am not on dreamhost, am using a shared hosting account and the errors are recent
anyway who do you override php.ini in you are on a shared host
mysql wait_timeout value
i just installed drupal tweak and realized that mysql wait_timeout value is 5secs
so i did i check and realized that the error appears just 5secs after you send a request
am yet to tell my host to change the value to see if it helps
but if u have access to your conf you can try it yourself
re
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Same problems here
Did you manage to resolve this?
I have the same problems with Dreamhost, Drupal 6.17 and various new and old sites, all experiencing this problem. I thought it was related to caching at first, because a clear-browser-cache then refresh would tend to make it go away, but I'm not so sure recently. I tried disabling caching, tried Boost to see if that would help, but nothing reliably works.
I've also noticed that cron isn't running reliably, and I've just checked and have got some errors regarding the menu_router, so I wonder if this is all related to the menu router table not being rebuilt correctly during a cron run?
Like I said this appears to be now affecting many of my sites to a greater or lesser extent and I'm a bit stumped!
Subscribing to this thread -
Subscribing to this thread - running into the same problem on Dreamhost with only 1 low-traffic site - have about 5 other sites on Dreamhost with no problems. I upgraded this site to Dreamhost PS, and up'd my PHP memory limit to 300MB. This significantly improved performance and reliability, but I still get the "page not found" error frequently - and after only a second or two.
Add my voice to those who are
Add my voice to those who are experiencing this problem. I have a low-traffic client site that's having this problem. I'm about to do a thorough diagnostic, but I have a feeling it's just going to end up being a Dreamhost issue.
We run a bunch of sites on a Dreamhost private server without these issues (though we do get speed problems periodically). This one happens to be on shared, though.
One configuration difference between the way the site with the problems is set up and the way we set up our sites with private servers is that the PS sites all have mod_php instead of just PHP 5 FastCGI. Mod is not offered to shared customers.
another case
It seems that this is a common problem. I've been getting a bunch of 'Page Not Found' errors lately, too.
Also had this problem
I have switched to a clean Fedora 13 install on linhost due to having this problem with a VPS from Dreamhost. On Dreamhost, I over rode the php.ini settings using the instructions from their wiki. My site worked fine until I had an processor intensive user import which lead to this error.
Darrell Duane
d@duane.com
I recently found out that
I recently found out that this advice – http://drupal.org/node/213260#comment-2266880 – lets you trade some loading speed for a marked decrease in 500 errors. Just a trade-off though, no free lunch.
edit: ahh, it's already mentioned above. Damn threaded comments... :)