Please help me understand IPS service plans ...

[tonyv]

Perhaps my concerns are unfounded from lack of computer understanding. In any case, please help me understand.

I'm an IPS hosted client on a Legacy package. My board is a small poetry enthusiast community with 18,607 posts. I have 80 members, out of which maybe 30 have posted at all some time in the past, and maybe 10 are regularly active (i.e. posting or lurking daily or weekly). The rest are inactive.

My Legacy package includes 200MB of disk space usage. Here's a picture of where I'm at according to cPanel:

I have asked Invision what happens when the disk space quota is reached and was told that "stuff breaks" when that happens. I have asked if I can pay for more disk space usage and was told that there is no option to pay for additional disk space. Rather, there is the option to switch to a newer package with higher disk space allowances and that the monthly cost of the newer packages is based upon the average daily number of users on a board.

I have asked Invision and been advised (if I understood correctly) that every "user" in the active users list is counted as a separate user even if there are a hundred or more entries at the same time in the active users list with the same IP.

I see this happening all the time, almost every day. At any given time there can be 30, 60, 90, 100, 300, etc. "users" on my board that are certainly not legitimate members or welcome guests and probably not even human. It's always a "user" with some IP that has many unrelated pages open. Here's an example:

As you can see, the user with IP starting with 117 even has the same topic open more than once and thus increases the "number of active users" accordingly. Here's a picture of the "active users" at the moment this "user" has multiple unrelated pages nonsensically open from all over the board and multiple instances of the same page open:

As you can see, there are 64 "guest" users on the board at this time (my board is set to display users active in the last five minutes), and having looked at the three pages of active users in the online list, it's clear that this one user with the IP starting with 117 accounts for the bulk of the "active users." And check out the maximum number of users on at once: 1,277! It's unlikely that 1,277 legitimate users (members and welcome human guests) visit my poetry board in one year, much less at one moment on one day.

Now, please help me understand, because it seems shady to me that the cost of the newer plans is calculated by including users like the one with 117 in its IP in the daily average of active users. I mean: why are the repeat IP's counted as separate users in the total number of users active at any given time??? The spike these unwelcome (and likely non-human) users cause in the daily average should not be counted and used in calculating the cost when their IP's appear more than once at the same time. This isn't an anomaly happening once in a while; it's happening often, maybe multiple times in a day. Banning the IP's is impractical; I can't watch for this 24/7, and even if I could it would go on endlessly, because once you ban one IP, it just happens again with a different IP.

I fear that it's impossible for me (or anyone) to budget for a board on one of the newer plans when this seemingly open ended method of calculating costs by averaging "active users" is used. As I mentioned, I might have up to ten members posting daily (not at once). There are days when I don't even come close to ten. I might have 10 legitimate guest poetry enthusiasts lurking daily, certainly not more in any given five minutes and probably not even in any hour. I fear that at any time Invision could point to the 64 users in the picture above or to 30 users on some other occasion when it's completely inaccurate. How can 30 be accurate if the active users list shows only three IP's and 28 of them are the same??? Really, even 30 legitimate active users for my board is probably a high average. There's just no way -- it's a small, obscure poetry board!

If I'm clueless and have no idea what I'm talking about, please forgive me. But please do help me understand, and if necessary set me straight. I don't know what to do. Given these circumstances I don't want to give up my fixed known cost and leave the calculation of plan cost to vagary. At the same time, it seems I'll be out of options when the disk space quota is reached. I don't want to close the board to guests, as from time to time I get a valued contributing member. And yet I can't afford to have stuff break either. I have a member who has built a reference section that has extremely complex tables with links pointing everywhere all over that section and the board. In fairness, the Reference section is getting some notoriety; from time to time I'm learning that some professor has recommended it to his students. But still, this has nothing to do with and no significant bearing on the "number of users" problem discussed above. The "users" that are causing the number to spike are not legitimate lurkers; it's clear from their completely random and nonsensical clicks that they are unwelcome guests, because they often have every page open at once all over the board.

Thanks for your thoughts and experience,

Tõnis (a.k.a. "Tony")

[tonyv]

No one will help little tony with this? :sad:

[Makoto]

I think you raise a good point, but I don't think there's much we can say regarding this.

Your best bet would be to contact IPS in a support ticket and point them to this thread.

It would be kind of unfair if I could just find the forum someone I don't like on here runs to spam them with hundreds of concurrent connections like this.

It would probably make more sense to not count multiple concurrent connections from a single IP as far as billing goes. These scrapers/malicious bots/crawlers are still likely hogging some resources regardless, but I don't think it's something that the client should be punished for. This is why I have my own license and my own server to host on though.

Best of luck to you.

[tonyv]

Thank you, Kirito, for your kind reply.

Your best bet would be to contact IPS in a support ticket and point them to this thread.

This is a great idea. I'll do that.

This is why I have my own license and my own server to host on though.

I hadn't even considered that this is what people might be doing, but that's because I'm inexperienced with all of this. I'm obviously far from ready for this option.

With appreciation,

Tony

[Makoto]

Well, that and my forum gets over 300 active users online during peak hours. It would literally cost me almost as much to use IPS' shared hosting service as it does to rent my E3-1270 dedicated server with a dedicated 1Gbps uplink, 30TB of monthly data transfer, dual SSD and 3x1TB hardware RAID 5 storage array.

IPS hosting is probably good for smaller forums, but when you start getting hundreds of users online at once, you really need to look into renting your own hardware. I've considered raising concerns over the high cost of IPS' hosting plans before, notably from "Super" and up, but I don't think it would get anywhere. For smaller forums, the pricing isn't bad, but it's not great. That's just my opinion though.

Either way, you're paying for the simplicity. Which is good for small forums. IPS hosting should be fine for you, your problem is you're seeing a spike in traffic from illegitimate traffic, and you shouldn't be punished and forced to upgrade in response to that if you do upgrade your plan. But as it stands, that could very likely happen, because I believe it's an automated system. I don't know though. That's why I recommend simply contacting them over your concerns. I'm sure they'll be able to help you.

[ADKGamers]

Well as suggested please do contact IPS, but banning IPs is practical, especially if you plan on having a small board with not a lot of users. I'm certain you'll see it's probably that same bot over and over again. So if you don't want it, just block a certain range of those IPs.

I hope everything gets worked out for you though.

[gmaister22]

I'd first of all get a Standard License and have my site moved to a VPS or Shared Host...they are many reputable providers out there

[Rhett]

Hello, here are some answers for you, however addressing this via a ticket would be best for you as well, as we can reply quicker and resolve your concerns for you.

For starters, the hosting plan you are on is very old and not longer offered, the limits were low back then, and why you are seeing such low limits. As you have mentioned we do base our new plans on users online and well as greatly increased disk space. However to clarify the usage counts etc, we take a user online average ever 15 minutes, and then average that data over a 48 hour window. So while you could have 50 users online during peak times, if that fell to little to nothing during off peak, then it would be the average of approx 25 and not the peak.

Using a proper robots.txt file you can slow down the bots hitting your site to respectable levels as well, to keep them in check, there are also many bad bots that can be blocked as well.

Built into our hosting fee's are also the cost of the license for the board and apps, so this does increase the cost over a typical shared hosting provider. However we have a very high end data center and equipment that we host our customers on as well. Our servers are finely tuned to our software and we keep them in great shape load wise. We do not oversell our services which provides the needed overhead for a well running machine.

We are actually in the process now of upgrading all of servers to brand new hardware with 5 times the processing power and twice the disk performance, we have completed about half of them at this point and should be finished in a few weeks time.

So while there may be cheaper shared hosting out there, I can ensure you that you won't get the performance, support or up-time to match our hosting offerings. Keep your eyes on our company blog soon, as we will have some more exciting news regarding our hosted offerings to come in the next few weeks.

[Makoto]

So while there may be cheaper shared hosting out there, I can ensure you that you won't get the performance, support or up-time to match our hosting offerings. Keep your eyes on our company blog soon, as we will have some more exciting news regarding our hosted offerings to come in the next few weeks.

For most clients, I don't doubt this at all. For most forums it is probably a great service. But for forums that have hundreds of active users online average, you're essentially charging the cost of an entire dedicated server for one client, that's where my concerns are. I understand you also seem to offer some exclusive services to clients that opt for these higher end "advanced" packages, but still.

$330-$590/month is very high for a shared hosting service, even for more active site's.

For most clients using the lower end packages, I think it is a good deal for what you offer, though I have no experience with IPS hosting so I can't vouch or comment on the quality of service. You do seem to take pride in offering quality service though, which I do respect.

[tonyv]

Thanks to all who have replied. As I mentioned, being inexperienced I probably need IPS and its support to keep things running smoothly (or at all) on my small board. I have opened a ticket pointing to this topic, and I've often opened a ticket to fix things which I would be on my own with if I was hosted elsewhere. I do have the robots.txt file Rhett mentioned applied on my board; IPS did it on a past ticket.

For starters, the hosting plan you are on is very old and not longer offered, the limits were low back then, and why you are seeing such low limits. As you have mentioned we do base our new plans on users online and well as greatly increased disk space. However to clarify the usage counts etc, we take a user online average ever 15 minutes, and then average that data over a 48 hour window. So while you could have 50 users online during peak times, if that fell to little to nothing during off peak, then it would be the average of approx 25 and not the peak.

I do realize my hosting package is old. It's clear that I must move to a newer plan soon. And I don't see anything wrong with the "user online average over 15 minutes averaged over a 48 hour window" method -- seems pretty fair -- but I still don't understand why a user with one IP over any same 15 minute time frame is used in the average and counted more than once. In the picture in Post number 1, why is the user with IP 177.19.232.40 applied more than once toward any average??? That's a picture from the same fifteen minute (five minute to be exact) time frame, and it's the same "person"/"user"/ip. If you're taking that five minute time frame pictured and using it in the 15 minutes to get the 48 hour average, why are you counting user 177.19.232.40 as more than one user? Also how do you decide which 15 minutes to use in the 48 hour average? That's what's incomprehensible to me ...

Tony

[Rhett]

Hi Tony, I just looked up your ticket, replied and moved it to our hosting department for you, please use the ticket for further follow up if needed.

Thank you again

[tonyv]

Thanks, everyone, for your thoughts and experience.

... banning IPs is practical, especially if you plan on having a small board with not a lot of users ...

I hope everything gets worked out for you though.

Yes, maybe I'll throw some of those IP's in the BanList if I see them while I'm on the board. Why not? I was doing that at one point way back, but it seemed like new ones were showing up often, so I just kind of gave up and stopped. I'll start banning them again when I see them.

I'd first of all get a Standard License and have my site moved to a VPS or Shared Host...they are many reputable providers out there

This is something that could happen eventually. It's good to know there are options. What I feared most about even considering the options was losing the IPS support, as I rely on it. But as you explained backchannel, the IPS support is still there if I buy the license. Besides, it might be cool to own the license anyway. :cool:

Hi Tony, I just looked up your ticket, replied and moved it to our hosting department for you, please use the ticket for further follow up if needed.

Thank you again

Thanks for that, Rhett. I guess I should have flagged the ticket "hosting" instead of "general" to begin with. Still learning here! :geek: I will reply on the ticket and get going on a course of action. The data space limit unnerves me, so I'd like to move forward and get that concern behind me. My board is so small compared to many (or most) boards out there, and it's not monetized in any way. I pay for it, and it's really a labor of love. Just trying to keep my costs down.

Tony

[tonyv]

Well, I'm happy to report that I upgraded to the Plus40 hosting package, and the disk space issue is no longer a concern. The new package has ten times the disk space I'm using now.

Thanks again to everyone who replied here. I marked my IPS support ticket "Resolved."

Tony :cool:

[Rhett]

Well, I'm happy to report that I upgraded to the Plus40 hosting package, and the disk space issue is no longer a concern. The new package has ten times the disk space I'm using now.

Thanks again to everyone who replied here. I marked my IPS support ticket "Resolved."

Tony :cool:

Tony, thank you again for your business over the years, if you see any issues at all please file a ticket in our hosting department and we will be able to give you a hand to ensure you are taken care of. :)