CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I had been trying to install and run CiViCRM during 4 months for one year ago both on Drupal and Joomla. I’ve been desperate some times and got negative karma from Lobo and at the end I decided to drop it.
I can see that number of issues becomes not less since I’ve left the forum. Despite the idea is great the implementation requires a lot of resources and competences.
I’m pretty sure that installing it on shared servers is pretty risky because hosting provider can change settings and you can loose the system without alternatives.

I have seen on the forum where shared hosting have worked for some. I gues it all depends on how much access you have to the configurations and settings.

Bluehost seems to work pretty good.

So do you think I should install all sites using CiviCRM on a Shared Server?

It was also worked for me until my provider changed configuration. I will just say that CiViCRM is very unreliable on shared servers. It wasn’t originally designed for shared servers as Lobo underlines. People must to know, that it is very tricky to install and maintain the system just to avoid waste of time.

You say the system worked until your provider changed configurations, but you seem to be placing the blame with CiviCRM?

Edit: I think I misread you here, and I apologise for any offense if I did so. On reflection, I suspect you're saying the same thing I am, which is that CiviCRM requires a more capable hosting environment than most shared servers offer.

CiviCRM is an intensive application, I'd be circumspect about running anything but a basic blog on a shared mass-hosted server myself.

Even with a simple application like Wordpress the performance difference between most shared mass-hosted servers and professional level hosting is dramatic. There's enormous competition in the market for low-end hosting, but the fact that there's a lot of competition there doesn't stop them being low-end. Is that what you're shopping for?

If that's all someone needs, I'm happy for them, but I would not be able to conscientiously recommend my customers use a shared mass-hosting packages, unless for a very simple (placeholder/brochure) site. This isn't specific to CiviCRM - I'd say the same for Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress ...

I've heard many times of cases where a customer has put their foot down - "we couldn't possibly spend more on hosting" - and then sunk many times more money than they saved on hosting paying their developer to work around the limitations of a shared mass-hosting provider.

Many clients will attempt to be helpful by arranging for hosting deals themselves. "Oh, I got a great deal, five years prepaid on Yahoo! hosting." ... This is like "helping" your mechanic by shopping for sparkplugs at a surplus car parts barn.

My recommendation: go with a hosting company who know and support CiviCRM.

See http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Hosting+provider+information for some suggestions.

(I've corrected this post to discern between shared servers, which can be fine, and mass-hosting setups, which as a rule are not. Not all shared hosts are awful.)

100% agree with conductorchris. It is primarily small non-profits, that suffer of lack of resources and need cheep or free systems. It is very big and thankful segment and CiviCRM could be leading forward at this market. I suspect that CiviCRM has some commercial goals with bigger organizations, but the question is why they ignore the needs of the small. I think they lose a great part of their admirers which can lead them to other segments on the market.
Another fact is that the small non-profits don’t have alternatives to CiviCRM as the bigger ones that can self develop or adjust such systems.   

1. It would be helpful if it was more clearly stated that civiCRM is not recommended for shared servers (or a more detailed explanation of what is needed from the hosts, so one could tell which hosts won't work).  After doing my research on civiCRM I was not aware of all this trouble I was in for and might have made some decisions differently.

2. The fact is that having a dedicated server and an IT person is a luxury for most small non-profits.  My organization is me.  Yet we need what civiCRM offers, or at least most of it.  I feel like civiCRM is close, very close, to being able to operate on a shared server.  It would be useful to create another version, stripped down a bit - or make some parts of civiCRM optional on install.  I realize this complicates life for the core team, but I think it's very important that some version of civiCRM be accessible to the small non-profits as well.  Connecting to WordPress instead of Joomla or Dropal would also facilitate this.

Not all shared hosts are equal.

You don't need a dedicated machine to run CiviCRM - in fact, we host several CiviCRM installs on a machine which has been tuned for running CiviCRM and Drupal, and this method has performance benefits because we're able to share some of the codebase (Drupal multi-site) and cache code for optimal performance.

What you do need is a server which is not overloaded, and ideally one which is tuned for your needs. Different web apps have very different profiles and need to be tuned differently. Likewise, different sites have different profiles, and benefit from further tuning on a per-site level.

A standard mass-hosting environment is not able to tune for the application you're using. They have to aim for the sweet spot which will provide acceptable performance whether a customer is running phpBB2, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, expressionEngine, or one of many many PHP applications. If they provide other languages (eg RoR, Python, Perl) which you don't use, that still adds overhead - the server needs to have those modules available, which costs RAM. Adding these facilities looks great for the host on a feature-comparison sheet, but actually may reduce the performance you as a customer get.

Also, for simple economic reasons, a dollar-hosting scheme (or any cheap mass-hosting product) is significantly more likely to be overloaded with sites than a Drupal/CiviCRM host who charges a few dollars more. Most customers will simply go for the cheapest option. If you're on the cheaper server, those other customers will then be competing with you for resources.

In short: A mass hosting setup will probably be tuned to suit the lowest common denominator, not your specific needs, and they are more likely to be overloaded.

A CiviCRM focussed host, on the other hand, can remove additional load that you don't need by turning off these "features". They can use tools like an opcode cache aggressively, to ensure that each request spends less time compiling code and more time serving results. They can fine-tune their DB to suit CiviCRM's profile. And they are significantly more likely to be familiar with the specific needs of a CiviCRM customer too. You'll get a lot more; for this you'll probably pay an extra margin in hosting, but I believe you'll be more likely to save money on support and development by choosing the right hosting platform out of the box.

I recently transferred a customer, who had tried out two mass-hosting environments, to a server we manage. He described the the improvement as "the difference between night and day" and "like moving from dialup to broadband". They are a small community welfare org, delivering grants to people in rural areas who themselves are likely to have dialup connections. For the additional NZD$5/month they will pay in hosting, I expect they will reach significantly more of their target families by making their site more responsive. Consider that if your target audience can't be expected to have a high-class internet connection, any degradation in your own hosting setup will be magnified by the bottlenecks at both ends.

Yes, budgets are limited for many small orgs. That makes it all the more important for those orgs to make informed decisions on where they should try to trim fat. Shaving $2/month off your hosting plan for "cost-saving" reasons may actually be a really expensive move when a single generous donor finds the site too slow and moves on.

100% agree with conductorchris. It is primarily small non-profits, that suffer of lack of resources and need cheep or free systems. It is very big and thankful segment and CiviCRM could be leading forward at this market. I suspect that CiviCRM has some commercial goals with bigger organizations, but the question is why they ignore the needs of the small. I think they lose a great part of their admirers which can lead them to other segments on the market. Another fact is that the small non-profits don’t have alternatives to CiviCRM as the bigger ones that can self develop or adjust such systems.   

I don't feel that the CiviCRM team "ignore the needs of the small", but I do think it's an interesting question to see how CiviCRM performs in the real world on some of these shared hosts. Perhaps an interesting project would be to profile some CiviCRM installs across the spectrum of users, and try to gather usage data which could identify bottlenecks that cause performance issues on various setups. We could add some profiling code to return data back to CiviCRM and do an in-depth performance survey.

DISCLAIMER (I forget the right term for "I need to reveal my commercial interest"): The company I work for hosts Drupal + CiviCRM. We only host sites that we've been directly involved in and don't advertise the service, so I'm not touting for additional work here!

The problem with dedicated servers is that they require some additional efforts, such as regular backup and updates, reliable recovery procedures, maintenance and knowledge to security standards so on, which requires qualified human resources. That’s why the many of us prefer to stay away from this wall.
The CiviCRM team doing great job and deserve respect but I’m trying to share my experience with other ant set focus on the problem.     

See
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,5977.0.html
For how I "solved" my issue.  (Mostly solved, but with some workarounds because of the limited capacities of my shared server setup - and installing in parts, etc)