Is it me or is Berkshire Extremely slow?

[HostSeer]

I've noticed over the past few weeks that all my sites on Berkshire are extremely slow.

I also get a lot of 500 errors and I've had a couple of random out of memory errors when using Wordpress.

Is this a feature of Berkshire? Or can we expect an improvement?

[H9Jen]

It's possible that you're hitting your resource limit in your container since CloudLinux was installed - with CL, if you are outstripping your own resources, your site will slow down vs. the entire server slowing down.

If you submit a ticket, we can take a look at your site history and determine if that is the case.

[HostSeer]

I'll do that - but I have a lot of work on establishing what parts of my sites your malware script keeps deleting without informing anyone - Hostnine is slowly looking not as viable a hosting option as I thought...

Also, I've only installed wordpress on the sites - if you are now saying that your resource levels don't allow for wordpress installs then I think you may have your settings wrong - it is quite popular and I've never had a problem on any of my other hosts...

[H9Jen]

The Malware Scanner that we use doesn't delete anything, and there is always a report emailed to the tech desk as well as left on the server so that we are aware of any actions that it performs.

Our Malware Scanner will quarantine suspicious files, and while it does move them out of the live (and serving to the public) web site area, it places that file in a holding area so our techs can look at the file and determine whether it's infected or was a rare false positive. If it's a false positive, it's returned to the site and should not be scanned again unless the timestamp on the file changes.

For files that are frequently edited and frequently set off a false positive as their timestamp keeps changing, that file can be exempted from the scan so that it is not scanned again.

What seems to be caught most on false positives is Base64 Encoding which some plugin developers for WordPress seem to rely on to hide their own credit links in their software. Base64 is easily decoded, and is now also heavily being used by developers that develop templates and plugins to hide malware in WordPress sites. It's much easier to get you to install Malware in your own site then it is to go to the trouble of hacking it, so Base64 encoding on sites is always highly suspect, but because some developers do use it to encode things they don't want deleted, it also has the highest percentage of false positives.

Most WordPress sites on our servers are running perfectly fine even after CloudLinux was installed. There were a few that did frequently hit their resource limits, but usually we were able to determine where those resources were hitting the ceiling - for example, one site was re-generating a site map of the entire site every time they posted an article, and they posted an article every few minutes - that type of use is very inefficient and doing that type of blogging should really be done on it's own machine.

In other cases, the site was loaded down with plugins, didn't use caching, pinged the database way too frequently. WordPress can be very efficient - it can also be obscenely inefficient. It really depends on the way it's set up.

[HostSeer]

OK

Point taken

When will the quaranteened files or parts of files be returned?

I have over 100 sites, all using proprietary scripts such as WPRobot, JVBlogpro, JVAds or similar.

The thought of listing all the scripts across all the sites I have up is daunting

[H9Jen]

The quarantined files are returned once they are checked by a staff member and confirmed to be a false positive - if they do contain malware, they are not un-quarantined.

If you wish directories to be exempted, you can do that as well, however, if they are not being scanned and they are reported with malware, if found the site will simply be suspended instead of scanned and cleaned.

[HostSeer]

OK, what timeframe for your technicians to check the files?

It is great that you are protecting us, however, effectively shutting down my sites functionality without notice and without giving a timeframe is very unreasonable.

[H9Jen]

The quarantine report is submitted to a ticket on the ticket desk, so they're "worked" like any other ticket in the order they are received, with the turnaround time being roughly the same of a regular ticket.