My Terrible Experience with MochaHost
A couple of years ago, I caught the bug that is the modern day twentysomething equivalent of a mid-life crisis: I wanted to start a blog. I looked around very briefly (whoops), then signed up for a very cheap shared hosting account with MochaHost, a hosting provider, starting my blog muchtooscrawled.com. I didn’t really write a whole lot, but I did have one article on HTTPS certificate verification in Python with urllib2 that garnered a modest number of hits. It’s a common problem. Among a very specific group of people.
Garnered a modest number of hits, that is, until today, when I received an email from abuse@mochahost.com informing me that my account was using too many resources and had been summarily suspended. Here is the full text of the email:
Dear Client,Your hosting account has been investigated by our administrators due to excessive load/high resource utilization which includes high CPU utilization and memory consumption produced by your MySQL database and MySQL Queries. Unfortunately due to the severe nature of the problem the account has been suspended in order to prevent server crash and impact on the rest of the clients hosted on the same server.
We have determined that based on the excessive resource utilization your
account is not a good fit for our shared hosting environment.
Time : 27143 s total, 24.497292 s avg, 6 s to 398 s max (2.72%)
95% of Time : 17857 s total, 16.974335 s avg, 6 s to 40 s max
Lock Time (s) : 11142 s total, 10.055957 s avg, 0 to 361 s max (2.91%)
95% of Lock : 7064 s total, 6.714829 s avg, 0 to 19 s max
Rows sent : 0 avg, 0 to 0 max (0.00%)
Rows examined : 0 avg, 0 to 0 max (0.00%)
If you are unable to fix this problem we can offer you 2 alternative solutions:
1)Obtaining a private virtual server (VPS) account which comes with free migration (for our LINUX SERVERS) and free setup and starts at $23/month. For more information please review http://www.mochahost.com/vps.php or
2)Obtaining a dedicated server which comes with free migration and free setup the server pricing for which you can obtain at http://www.mochahost.com/linux_dedicated_cloud.php
We do appreciate your prompt response and cooperation.
Please let us know if we can be in further assistance.
Sincerely,
MochaSupport Team
2880 Zanker Rd #203,
San Jose, CA 95134
http://www.MochaHost.com
support@mochasupport.com
Fix the problem? The entire site is nothing but a WordPress installation, installed using the tools provided by MochaHost, serving less than 700 pageviews a month! [Sidenote: it almost has to be this way, since there is no SSH access to the site and I'll be damned if I'm going to manage my site with FTP]
Here is a snapshot of my Google Analytics for the entire blog:
Clearly to me one or more of the following is true: MochaHost is trying to scam me into buying more of their shitty services; MochaHost shared accounts can’t handle even the most paltry hitrates; or there is a problem with the MochaHost servers. Regardless of which is true, I will never again use MochaHost, and I would heartily recommend that everyone else who wants even some vague assurance that their websites will be available do the same. Luckily, I had already had a taste of their useless services, and had migrated to this beautiful new blog. If had been losing money on my downtime, I may have gone into the blood rage.
Just got the same exact problem – they are the absolute worst.
My personal site gets one or two hits a day. ..
I was just about to click “buy” when I decided to google MochaHost one more time, leading me to your post. I’m interested in starting a small wordpress site for myself. What are you using as a host now? Any other good (and cheap) ones out there?
I am using Godaddy for this site primarily because they have perpetual ‘when you sign up we give it to you for very cheap’ deals, and I haven’t had any problems with them, though I have had problems with them in a more professional capacity in the past. If I was going to do it over, I would very likely use wordpress.com.
I also had the same issue, one of my Joomla websites with 100-200 visitors a day got suspended by MochaHost claiming its using much server resources! They just wanted me to upgrade to a higher package, but after few days effort they removed the suspension, I took a backup of my account and moved to a different provider. My complete story is available here. Never ever go with Mochahost, their packages are cheap as they are!
P.S. Joseph, please remove the backlink to their website from this blog post, do not help them in indexing their website on search engines.
I am very pleased with Mochahost , they provided me with a very cheap hosting plan and since then my life changed. I started my own business from Soho plan and now I use VPS with them. Going through every plan Mocha offers , I was completely satisfied and I may say that the upgrades made were because I expanded my business. Now I own 6 sites which grant me about $60 000 a month .
I have no idea why you guys had problems. Maybe you were not lucky enough
Christopher, let me congratulate you on your success. Frankly though, reliance on luck for uptime is not what I’m looking for in a web host
I have found that the chat techies are relatively inexperienced and the only way to get something resolved is a lot of patience and kindness. They obviously are overworked. The actual support ticket guys are better but the same rule applies. I don’t believe they are actually trying to scam anyone. They just jump to conclusions way too fast blaming you for issues without investigating issues more than 2 clicks away. If you need real pros, you need to pay more. Overall they do alright. It’s a tough business. Best of luck to you guys.
The same thing happened to me this morning, yes they done this in the early hours when no one even uses the site (its uk related).
They’ve forced me to upgrade to the Business package once already and this is yet another ploy to force people to keep giving yet more money.
I pointed out to them that their servers are VPS Opitmised which means the CPU, Memory and Resources are already restricted so this is just a con by Mochahost, how the hell is it using more resources when their restricted and no one is even using the site in the early hours of the morning!
I also had the terrible experience like you
I recommend you never buy any host or domain from this place, because the access to their database always have problem and not available in most cases,
your website would load heavily, and finally when you ask for refund, they refuse to refund you, they owe me 130 USD. read my more stories here http://www.facebook.com/MochahostNever
fatcow is sucks too , my site was down more than 24 hours and no reason was given …
WTF!!!
Joseph- Sounds like I signed up for MocaHost a bit too late, but luckily I only paid for the lowest possible and 1 month (all of $7). I am on a tight budget but that gives me more reason to keep off MocaHost; I can’t afford to upgrade if asked.
Christopher- I’d love to know what you’re doing in SOHO, really awesome to hear you’ve changed your life so drastically. My blog/ website will be dedicated to helping others do the same……once I get it up, that is.