Author Topic: K-Tools Hosting (Read 3434 times)

Pixart · « **on:** May 09, 2012, 13:51 »

Would anyone mind sharing their hosting experiences with me, where - how much good/bad etc. Thanks in advance!

lisafx · « **Reply #1 on:** May 09, 2012, 16:09 »

I'm at Bluehost, which was one of the webhosts recommended by Ktools. No problems at all. I've been there over a year and very happy.

velocicarpo · « **Reply #2 on:** May 09, 2012, 16:11 »

Quote from: Pixart on May 09, 2012, 13:51

Would anyone mind sharing their hosting experiences with me, where - how much good/bad etc. Thanks in advance!

I do not have personal experience with Ktools hosting, but I heard a lot of times that it is very reliable. Nevertheless IMHO you should consider a own VPS. It is much cheaper and the Problems with Server admin are overrated. A script like KTools is installed with just a few clicks. The most complicated should be installing the Database on a own VPS which takes like 5 clicks in CPanel.

cthoman · « **Reply #3 on:** May 09, 2012, 16:42 »

I use their own hosting. No problems other than the software has some things that should have been better.

princigalli · « **Reply #4 on:** May 17, 2012, 08:31 »

Ktools look nice, I think the pricing could have been different. Many people venturing in this business will need a lot of time to develop the site, maybe a subscription option would have been a great idea.

Pixart · « **Reply #5 on:** May 17, 2012, 10:30 »

They do have a subscription, but I think it was around $45 /month which includes installation, hosting and upgrades. I'd stay at Smugmug for a lot less than that. I need a site for hosting client files so I might as well sell my stock photos on it also - but don't like paying US taxes on my earnings so I need to do it myself.

djpadavona · « **Reply #6 on:** June 21, 2012, 10:30 »

In my personal experience I have seen our KTools site go offline for 30 to 90 minutes at a time, especially during the morning hours in the eastern US. Many times I have seen it run so slow that it was virtually inaccessible, and other members of WP have contacted me during such times to let me know...so it's not just from my end.

ppdd · « **Reply #7 on:** June 26, 2012, 12:30 »

I had really good luck with them but outgrew them.

I HIGHLY recommend http://www.knownhost.com for VPS or hybrid hosting. Great pricing on VPS and a lot of incremental plans and great, fast service.

RacePhoto · « **Reply #8 on:** June 27, 2012, 09:37 »

I use Gate.com for hosting a few sites, nice support, easy to manage behind the scenes, all the right software on the servers, reasonable prices. What people find is that the cheapest and some FBN hosting (in someones basement) just can't handle the traffic. Otherwise it's like going to a fast food place. The prices are similar, they are all competing, they all have the same fries, burgers and soft drinks.

What I'm pointing out is, find an established hosting company, that's not just the cheapest, it's for a business and people want to cut corners? I don't get it. You'll probably pay about $110 a year for a good one and about $10 a year for Domain Name Registration (two years at a time) Heck that's cheap! $10 a month for your own website.

They have a refer a friend program, I don't care about $25 for referrals. Just that gate.com is a good reliable service at a reasonable price. Take a look?

cclapper · « **Reply #9 on:** June 27, 2012, 09:46 »

Quote from: lisafx on May 09, 2012, 16:09

I'm at Bluehost, which was one of the webhosts recommended by Ktools. No problems at all. I've been there over a year and very happy.

I was there also with Ktools, and I have used bluehost for some client's sites. No problems.

djpadavona · « **Reply #10 on:** July 06, 2012, 10:00 »

We were down for 9 hours this morning, and I have the Google Analytics to prove it.

I'm afraid I can't recommend KTools hosting to anyone. This has to be the third outage I have caught in the last 45 days. Who knows how many I didn't catch?

cthoman · « **Reply #11 on:** July 06, 2012, 10:04 »

Quote from: djpadavona on July 06, 2012, 10:00

We were down for 9 hours this morning, and I have the Google Analytics to prove it. I'm afraid I can't recommend KTools hosting to anyone. This has to be the third outage I have caught in the last 45 days. Who knows how many I didn't catch?

Yeah, mine was down too.

leaf · « **Reply #12 on:** July 06, 2012, 14:12 »

you should use pingdom to track your down time (and warn you when your site is down). It is free if you just have it track one site
http://www.pingdom.com/

How much are your paying for ktools hosting? I've got my site hosted with wiredtree. I've been really happy with them but their minimum package is $50/month. I also have a few small sites with bluehost and can also say good things about them.

Phil · « **Reply #13 on:** July 06, 2012, 16:59 »

another for bluehost although I dont have ktools.
On my hosting I have cms account which I havent finished setting up yet (has about 6000 images so far, struggles if I upload more than 25-30 images at once). I also have a coppermine gallery with about 8000 images in it and about 6 other sites one of which gets about 200k pageviews a month. All up using about 85GB of space.
Overall it is not the super fast speeds of your own webserver, but it is respectable and of course you are only paying for shared hosting. the few times I have used support it has been fast and friendly.

leaf · « **Reply #14 on:** July 06, 2012, 17:01 »

Quote from: Phil on July 06, 2012, 16:59

another for bluehost although I dont have ktools.
On my hosting I have cms account which I havent finished setting up yet (has about 6000 images so far, struggles if I upload more than 25-30 images at once). I also have a coppermine gallery with about 8000 images in it and about 6 other sites one of which gets about 200k pageviews a month. All up using about 85GB of space.
Overall it is not the super fast speeds of your own webserver, but it is respectable and of course you are only paying for shared hosting. the few times I have used support it has been fast and friendly.

that's the best ad I have seen for bluehost so far

djpadavona · « **Reply #15 on:** July 08, 2012, 07:33 »

Quote from: cthoman on July 06, 2012, 10:04

Quote from: djpadavona on July 06, 2012, 10:00
We were down for 9 hours this morning, and I have the Google Analytics to prove it. I'm afraid I can't recommend KTools hosting to anyone. This has to be the third outage I have caught in the last 45 days. Who knows how many I didn't catch?

Yeah, mine was down too.

We've been down for 8.5 hours since last evening. I really can't express how terrible KTools hosting is. This is over 17 hours of downtime that I know of just in the last few days.

Suffice it to say we have to move, or simply raise the white flag. I'm not looking forward to the logistics of moving over 30 thousand images.

leaf · « **Reply #16 on:** July 08, 2012, 11:59 »

If you find a good host it really isn't a problem making the move. I just moved a number of big sites and it will take a while in terms of waiting for the transfer but transferring a big site and a small site require exactly the same steps... the length of wait is the only difference.

Just be sure to use shell access (or similar back door method) to transfer the site directly from one server to another.. don't go from Server A -> your computer -> server B

cthoman · « **Reply #17 on:** July 08, 2012, 13:28 »

Quote from: leaf on July 06, 2012, 14:12

you should use pingdom to track your down time (and warn you when your site is down). It is free if you just have it track one site
http://www.pingdom.com/

How much are your paying for ktools hosting? I've got my site hosted with wiredtree. I've been really happy with them but their minimum package is $50/month. I also have a few small sites with bluehost and can also say good things about them.

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out. Here's the hosting prices:

http://www.ktools.net/ktools.hosting.php

I'm not ready to pull the plug yet, but it was pretty bad this weekend. Definitely unacceptable. That said, I hadn't noticed any significant downtime prior to this. I should probably send out an email or phone call on Monday to get an explanation.

djpadavona · « **Reply #18 on:** July 08, 2012, 14:04 »

Quote from: cthoman on July 08, 2012, 13:28

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out. Here's the hosting prices:

http://www.ktools.net/ktools.hosting.php

I'm not ready to pull the plug yet, but it was pretty bad this weekend. Definitely unacceptable. That said, I hadn't noticed any significant downtime prior to this. I should probably send out an email or phone call on Monday to get an explanation.

Definitely. I went a step farther and demanded a refund of this month's hosting costs.

They talk a big game on their hosting page about "lifetime support" and "reliable hosting." But the truth is it is just 2 guys running the show, and they apparently aren't set up to monitor the servers 24/7. So if the server goes down at midnight on the weekend, plan on being down until someone walks into the office sometime the next day.

Hosting requires a lot more effort than that. If they can't keep up with it, they shouldn't offer it. I'd say at this point that any claims of reliable hosting is at best disingenuous.

cthoman · « **Reply #19 on:** July 08, 2012, 14:11 »

Quote from: djpadavona on July 08, 2012, 14:04

Quote from: cthoman on July 08, 2012, 13:28

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out. Here's the hosting prices:

http://www.ktools.net/ktools.hosting.php

I'm not ready to pull the plug yet, but it was pretty bad this weekend. Definitely unacceptable. That said, I hadn't noticed any significant downtime prior to this. I should probably send out an email or phone call on Monday to get an explanation.

Definitely. I went a step farther and demanded a refund of this month's hosting costs.

They talk a big game on their hosting page about "lifetime support" and "reliable hosting." But the truth is it is just 2 guys running the show, and they apparently aren't set up to monitor the servers 24/7. So if the server goes down at midnight on the weekend, plan on being down until someone walks into the office sometime the next day.

Hosting requires a lot more effort than that. If they can't keep up with it, they shouldn't offer it. I'd say at this point that any claims of reliable hosting is at best disingenuous.

That's kind of what I figured was happening by the hours that it was down. Unfortunately, I don't really have downtime hours. I've sold to people in Japan, Australia, Germany, UK, America and more. That means I should be open for business pretty much 24 hours a day.

djpadavona · « **Reply #20 on:** July 09, 2012, 09:15 »

Same with us Cory. As a guesstimate, I'd say 1/3 of all sales are non-US.

FWIW Warmpicture is hung up again this morning. I've been trying for 15 minutes to access our site and I can't. Google Analytics shows the visitor count stopped, so it's not my connection. You just can't make these things up. It's an unmitigated disaster.

cthoman · « **Reply #21 on:** July 09, 2012, 09:27 »

Yes. I'm down again this morning as well. I guess I should start looking for another host. I don't remember this ever happening with my Bluehost site, so maybe that is the way to go. I think that was on their recommended list.

djpadavona · « **Reply #22 on:** July 09, 2012, 09:37 »

The bigger issue is how Google treats these outages. They take server reliability and speed very seriously. I told the other contributors that we dropped 20 to 30 spots in the rankings just in the last few days. It's no coincidence.

So the bottom line is I really believe Warmpicture is finished. It's just too hard to come back from these repeated issues. It took me 3 solid months of daily link building to get us to where we were, and we lost it all in 4 days because of KTools.

Amanda_K · « **Reply #23 on:** July 09, 2012, 11:45 »

I'd be really careful about moving to Bluehost, I'm having issues with them lately running ktools , I'm seeing super high server loads according to the widget in ktools manager and some throttling recorded on my account recently which is new. It's certainly not due to overwhelming traffic as I haven't launched yet. Just a shared hosting hazard. I've been looking seriously at a move to Media Temple. I've used bluehost since 2005 I'd still recommend them for general hosting but not for a large ktools site.

cthoman · « **Reply #24 on:** July 09, 2012, 14:11 »

Quote from: 9lives on July 09, 2012, 11:45

I'd be really careful about moving to Bluehost, I'm having issues with them lately running ktools , I'm seeing super high server loads according to the widget in ktools manager and some throttling recorded on my account recently which is new. It's certainly not due to overwhelming traffic as I haven't launched yet. Just a shared hosting hazard. I've been looking seriously at a move to Media Temple. I've used bluehost since 2005 I'd still recommend them for general hosting but not for a large ktools site.

Thanks for the advice. I will definitely keep that in mind. It doesn't look like they do server to server website transfers either.

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Author Topic: K-Tools Hosting (Read 3434 times)

Pixart

lisafx

velocicarpo

cthoman

princigalli

Pixart

djpadavona

ppdd

RacePhoto

cclapper

djpadavona

cthoman

leaf

Phil

leaf

djpadavona

leaf

cthoman

djpadavona

cthoman

djpadavona

cthoman

djpadavona

Amanda_K

cthoman

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