Support

Hello Giulio,

This is a problem with Netsons' incorrect setup of mod_security on their server.

Shared hosts try to cram hundreds to thousands of sites into a single physical server. If left unrestrained, any one of these sites could use the majority of system resources leaving the other sites resource-deprived. In this case the performance of the hosted sites would be unpredictable and that’s bad for business. Trying to counter this shared hosts add additional rules unrelated to security to limit the number of requests per IP in an amount of time and the maximum time to serve each request.

By definition, a backup does use a lot of resources for a very limited amount of time. The definition of a backup is that you need to read the entirety of the database contents and the entirety of the server files and put them in a big archive file. There’s a specific amount of data that has to be processed. A properly coded backup software creates complete backups, i.e. reads all of this data. In order to do that in restricted environments like theirs we have to do a lot of requests (page loads) since they won’t of course allow a single page load of 10 minutes or so. Even worse, the more overloaded the server is, the more time is required. Think about having to travel 100Km on a roadster that can do 250 Km/h (fast host) and on a vespa which can only do 60 Km/h (Netsons).

This is where we enter a vicious circle. Netsons has overloaded their servers. In order to counter that they impose tighter restrictions in mod_security. However, the more overloaded a server is the longer it takes for a backup to run and the more requests it makes. This also makes it much more likely to hit one of those too tight mod_security rules. You see where this is going, right? FWIW 14 minutes for 55Mb is atrocious. On SiteGround a 300Mb backup takes all of 50 seconds. In simple words, Netsons is NINETY ONE (91) times slower than SiteGround. Why are you paying them?!

Why did your backup work when you disabled mod_security? Because the unrealistic restrictions they apply in mod_security by default were no longer present. Does it make any sense for them to give you an option to disable mod_security? Absolutely none whatsoever. They seem to not understand why or how they’re using it. The proper solution is to look at its log to find out which rule is getting in the way and optimise or remove just that rule. Of course Netsons' engineers are long known to have zero clue of what they're doing with their servers so it doesn't surprise me that they can't help you with a simple, obvious solution that would take a real engineer all of ten minutes...

So, my conclusion is the same that I reached over a year ago: Netsons’ engineers apparently know nothing at all about setting up their own (very crappy and slow) servers. My advice still remains to move your sites to a decent host, such as SiteGround or Rochen.

You're welcome!