Almost all cheap web hosting acting the same.
i've tried 6-7 web hosting with DNN.
In almost all of them the performance & support was poor.

The combination of Asp.Net + DNN (high level application) with thousand of
web sites in one server is too much.

I like DNN very much but when it come to performance & hosting costs,
it's a problem.
I have some PHP-BB forum application (with 1000 unique visitors a day),
it's much faster than DNN.

PortVista,

I am glad that you've provided a report of your experience with EasyCGI.  I wish others would do the same with their hosts so that the community could benefit and reward the companies that truly stand behind their services.  I have also had a number of issues with EasyCGI that I would like to describe to make sure none of us waste our time with a poor hosting provider in the future.

I reviewed a number of hosting companies before settling in on EasyCGI's top shared plan for http://www.stjoan.org back in February.  Gathering all of the content for this client took much longer than anticipated, so the site was not public for four months.  During this time, there was minimal traffic hitting the server and therefore the response times were fairly decent.  I did however have several support requests that took longer than I would have liked to resolve.  I began to doubt that EasyCGI's claims of 24x7 support were accurate.  I also experienced several outages that were caused by other accounts on the same server.

We finally went live in mid June with over 300 pages of content running on one instance of DNN 4.4.1.  Shortly thereafter, I held a training session for approximately 20 users that caused the site to grind to a halt.  All we were able to get through was the creation of their accounts and walking through adding pages to the site.  The site was actually knocked offline for almost an hour as a result.  Response times to the site seemed to get progressively worse so I started monitoring regularly.  The images below show response times over the last 30 days as reported by site24x7.com.  I have this configured to request the keepalive.aspx page every 10 minutes.


Notice that response times typically exceed 20 seconds.  During the last several days you can see that as the times getting progressively worse then reset.  My guess is that the process was killed at that point.

Site visits remained pretty low, so I don't think it's related to the load:

I have since migrated to 4.5.1, but site performance remains relatively slow.  While I was preparing for another training session, I created a support ticket with EasyCGI to have them investigate why response times were so poor.  Their reply, which came after a day of waiting, was that my site was using over 430MB of virtual memory.  They stated that this was in violation of the terms of service.  I've asked them to point out where this is specified, but have yet to hear back from them.  The second training session that I had also went horribly due to response times and an eventual site crash.

I'm now looking to switch to another host.  I am happy to see that PowerDNN.com now offers unlimited email accounts.  The plan that they had when I was looking earlier in the year limited the number of accounts under what this client needed.  I will also be checking MaximumASP.com.  Any feedback on these or others would be very welcome.