Worldwide Success

Back in August we reported in the post Problems with Yahoo Web Hosting that the Worldwide Success site was experiencing significant technical difficulties resulting is extremely slow performance and unavailability.  At that time we started working on transferring the site to a different host, but ran into some technical challenges exporting the MySQL database which delayed the process.  The slow performance and availability problem lasted a few days but suddenly the problem went away without any intervention.

Because of the technical challenges with the transfer and the improvement in the performance of the site, the transfer process was put on hold.  However, sometime in September the symptoms started appearing again and in the beginning of October the problem became much more severe and lasted the entire month of October.  As a consequence, there was a greater than 75% drop in the number of daily visitors for the month.

Several contacts were made with Yahoo support, but each contact was an exercise of frustration, as Yahoo would not admit that the problems were with their servers.  Despite of the fact that nothing had changed on the site, it became so slow that many times the browser connection would time out.  Yet Yahoo kept on blaming the site and would not even bother to look at their servers.  Here are some excerpts of responses received from Yahoo support.  It is clear that there is no consistency in their response, only a game of blame on anything other than Yahoo hosting:

Your site is loading slowly because you are loading content from twenty other domains, and because you have thirteen external javascripts and three external style sheets.

 

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,

Teddy R

Yahoo! Customer Care 

 

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Yahoo! Web Hosting has a limit of 100 concurrent connections to a mySQL database at one time. If a connection is opened but not closed by a PHP script, that connection will remain open for 20 hours, at which time it will be closed automatically.

 

If your script is not closing connections after the user is done with them, this may result in the connections remaining open long after your user has need of it, resulting in the maximum number of connections and the "500 Error".

 

Please do not hesitate to reply if you need further assistance.

 

Regards,

 

Igor

 

Yahoo! Web Hosting Customer Care

 

 

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Our investigation has shown that there are no technical issues with your Yahoo! Hosting account.  We believe that issue you are experiencing is related to your installation or configuration of the following software:

* Wordpress

While Yahoo! Hosting provides the ability to install this software, we cannot and do not provide full technical support for these products.  We suggest contacting the support services of these software products to fully diagnose this problem.

http://wordpress.org/support/

Please do not hesitate to reply if you need further assistance.

Regards,

Leo

Yahoo! Customer Care

 

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Pinging ww-success.com [68.142.212.128]:

Ping #1: Got reply from 68.142.212.128 in 2.3ms [TTL=56]
Ping #2: Got reply from 68.142.212.128 in 2.2ms [TTL=56]
Ping #3: Got reply from 68.142.212.128 in 2.2ms [TTL=56]
Ping #4: Got reply from 68.142.212.128 in 1.8ms [TTL=57]

Variation:                0.5ms (+/- 23%)

Shortest Time:            1.8ms
Average:                  2.1ms
Longest Time:              2.3ms

Done pinging ww-success.com!

It is clear from the above details that your domain is resolving at a normal pace. Our servers are running normally, so, you should not experience such inconvenience.

 

Currently, there are no detectable technical complications with the functionality of your Yahoo! Web Hosting account.

 

Regards,

Lee

Yahoo! Customer Care

Do these responses have any consistency?  Do they seem like they are trying to solve the problem or just point the finger at something other than Yahoo hosting?

Well, after being fed up with one lousy response after another, we aggressively moved forward with the transfer and had the site moved to Hostgator in less than a week.  The transfer went more smoothly than expected, and the Hostgator staff helped transfer the files and the database at not charge!  The only problems experienced were one plugin that stopped working unexplainably, and some character set issues with the title of the posts.  The plugin was replaced and the character set issues corrected manually.

We are happy to report that the site is now much faster.  Hostgator is not only much faster than Yahoo Hosting, it is cheaper and has much better support.  If you had visited this site in September or October, you will now notice a significant improvement in the speed of the site.  The results speak for themselves.

There are a few lessons to be learned from this experience that are applicable to success in any field of endeavor.  First, never accept mediocre service from a vendor.  If you are not happy with the services provided by any vendor, leave them promptly.  Second, face your problems head on.  Ignoring the early signs of a problem can result in significant additional risk.  Doing the right thing as soon as possible may mean going through some temporary pain, but in the end it pays off immensely.

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