Hosting Nightmares

Posted on July 8, 2009
Filed Under General | 2 Comments

Real Estate Website Hosting

There are people that believe all things happen for a reason and a purpose and in a lot of ways I’m actually hoping that is true. In the last two weeks, I’ve encountered more than my monthly share of clients and bloggers frustrated with the reality of the domain hosting world. Its not at all uncommon in the Real Estate web site business since that type of hosting is a different animal all together. However, when e-commerce sites start to tank, I’m grateful that I have always had a backup as I soon discovered recently. Granted, many commercial shared hosting companies deliver excessively on their promise to provide unlimited everything for next to nothing but not all projects can benefit from such offers. Ten bucks a month is no money at all to host a blog or OpenRealty or even a Joomla site anymore but what happens when the hosts server configuration wont meet the minimum requirements?

Although I have a full length article in revision that addresses many of the issues associated to hosting e-commerce and real estate type websites, I wanted to drop in and make brief note on this subject because of recent events that leave people so frustrated. The simple fact is, not all hosting is alike and not all hosting will fit the bill for all types of projects. With regard to real estate websites especially being of a special class all of their own, its not uncommon to see people investing in a commercial hosting account only to realize that it doesn’t work. But why doesn’t it work?

In order to answer why it doesn’t work in any great detail goes beyond my desire to post right now. A summary of reasons however would begin with what is required for an MLS empowered site or even an e-commerce site. Since both types of sites deal with large database queries, large image inventories for the gallery of products they represent and the need for some types of CRON automated script features, many hosting companies can not accommodate. The end result can cost in terms of delays and even loss of business if these things are not accounted for.

Hosting by and large is a numbers game. You turn out an offer for unlimited bandwidth, unlimited space, unlimited emails for an excellent price. Hosting companies know that very few customers will ever use unlimited anything so the selling point is moot for a blogger or anyone not using resource intense features in their sites. This however doesn’t stop people from trying to host MLS empowered real estate sites which most often results in scripts and or searches crashing. The reason behind this most often ends up being one of three issues. Not exclusively these three issues but more often than not. Here they are in brief.

The first is max_execution_time.

Running an MLS update that involves say a few hundred listings isn’t likely going to encounter this but when you start processing several thousand listings and the image download via RETS or another type of IDX inclusion the max_execution_time will most certainly need to be set high enough to accommodate this. Most commercial shared hosting service providers have this set at 30 to 60 and are usually not willing to raise this. In my own projects I like to have room for mistakes and slow RETS connections that can surface from time to time so on my own servers I’ll either set this to zero or 300

The next is fOpen and URL Includes.

Both of these are a valid security concern and hosting companies usually demand that you re-script accordingly or you suffer having the need for either. With real estate websites its not uncommon to need some sort of URL include for things like featured listings in your blog or maybe fopen to download MLS updates in zip or tar.gz format. I can’t count how many times I’ve encountered a situation where our normal download scripts fail to run on many servers.

Another is peak bandwidth and bandwidth throttling.

Part of the hosting game is to pack as many hosting clients as you realistically can on a server in order to justify that 24/7 support with all those exceptional unlimited everything features. The problem with that is the potential to bottle neck the connection and although load balancing and other things can be implemented to solve most of that, a good majority of IT professionals working for these hosting companies opt for some sort of bandwidth throttling. Bandwidth throttling will limit (“throttle”) the quantity of data it transmits and/or accepts within a specified period of time. This can cause some issues beginning with slow site response and time outs for larger commerce or real estate sites. Now its important to note that this isn’t usually associated to DB queries but can none the less include them. If you have several thousand listings and you are a good webmaster and you do the normal updates and exports to Google, Yahoo, MSN and the like. You will receive a spank of traffic for indexing alone and this can tank many sites to the point they become non-responsive. I’ve seen it happen all to often and it has always been revealed to us as being the web hosts safety net, bandwidth throttling.

I have a full well researched detail oriented post about hosting for real estate sites being revised and edited for a future post. If you stay tuned I’ll be updating my blogs nasty little layout to the new design and will be adding such articles to a category that addresses real estate sites exclusively.

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