StartLogic Hosting Plan

Just a quick note for those who’re planning to use vzPoll feature at Startlogic – the web application is not replaced by Improved Poll Tool. The notice, released on 28/10/2008, is as below:

Improved Poll Tool will Replace vzPoll

As part of our ongoing efforts to provide our customers with the most updated tools available, we will be discontinuing vzPoll and providing an upgraded polling tool.

If you are currently using vzPoll, we recommend you upgrade to Poll Taker, as vzPoll will be discontinued as of November 30, 2008. After November 30, you will not be able to access, edit or analyze polls that you are running with vzPoll, however you will be able to manually remove vzPoll polls from your site.

We regret any inconvenience to you if you actively use vzPoll, but believe that providing an upgraded polling tool will be beneficial to all customers.

If you have any questions, please contact StartLogic support at 800-725-8064.

It’s good to see folks at StartLogic are putting ongoing efforts in upgrading their hosting features. As for one of the latest updates, StartLogic current Mail 3.0 will be upgraded to Mail 4.0. The upgrades will offer a better enhanced mail management options.

For those who’re using Mail 3.0, you can manually upgrade your email management service. To upgrade, simply login to your vDeck control panel, go to “Mail Central” and click “Mail Tool Settings” on your right. The Mail Tool Settings page allows you to easily update by just checking on the radio button.

In case you’ve miss this and do not complete the upgrade prior to November 30, it will be upgraded automatically on that date.

When you’re hosting with StartLogic, it’s important to know that the web host limits your MySQL usage. As in one of the latest notice released, StartLogic sets the bar at 50,000 MySQL queries per hour. Users who exceed the quota will be warned with an immediate notice (I suspect temporary account suspension might be the next consequences).

For your reference, here is the full version of the notice

MySQL QUERIES: 50,000 PER HOUR

To ensure optimum MySQL performance for all our customers, we are limiting the number of queries per login to 50,000 per hour and the duration of individual queries to 60 seconds.

This should not be an issue for the vast majority of customers — in fact, most customers will experience improved performance as a result of this measure. However, if you do suspect that you’re exceeding the query limit, log into your MySQL Management Tool, and if you’re over the limit, you’ll see a notice with more info.

We apologize for any inconvenience; however, on a shared hosting platform, there are practical limits to the amount of resources we can dedicate to individual customers. If this becomes an issue for you, you may be able to reduce the number of queries you are running by using application-level caching, combining queries or taking advantage of nested queries wherever you can.

My comment on this policy

Well calling this unfair on the limitations, StartLogic users should be happy that at least they are listing down the policy clearly.

It’s no secret that while shared hosting accounts nowadays are offered with unlimited bandwidth/disk storage, the hosting usage is limited by computer’s resources. In fact many other web hosts wouldn’t list down the policy clear and surprise their users with a sudden-suspend on their hosting account (due to overusing server resources).

Also 50,000 queries per hour should be pretty sufficient for most website. As said, the policy should not be an issue for the vast majority of customers; whereas, most customers will experience improved performance as a result of this measure.