Is it IONOS, is it InnoDB, or is it me?
When I moved my WordPress blog to IONOS end-2022, I was relatively satisfied, despite a bumpy start. The previous hosting was using an older MySQL, the DB was exported as utf8_general_ci, and it got imported into MariaDB as utf8mb3_unicode_ci, but what it needed to be was utf8mb4_unicode_ci. Frankly, I consider these databases as being stupidly designed. Outside this stupid DB collation, people only talk of UTF-8 (1 to 4 bytes, as needed) and UTF-16 (2 or 4 bytes). But MySQL and MariaDB are limiting utf8_general_ci and utf8mb3_unicode_ci to 3 bytes, so to accommodate a UTF8-8 text that occasionally needs 4 bytes, utf8mb4_unicode_ci must be used. But it didn’t detect that by itself, so it screwed some things. And then some others.
What bothered me today what to discover that the database itself took an unbelievably large space:
OK, this is what it takes now. What it used to take was 1.44 GB! But phpMyAdmin showed only 137.1 MiB!
These nincompoops don’t have a ticketing system à la Zendesk, Soho, Jira, etc. You’re supposed to call them, or to tell them to call you back. Now, suppose I was deaf and dumb. There is legislation against discrimination, so limiting the assistance to voice communication is simply illegal! In practice, they do answer the e-mails, but you won’t get a ticket number or a case number. It’s just a dumb exchange of mails, without even preserving the history of the conversation in their answers! I’m a customer of IONOS France, but this mental retardation is inherited from their mother company, IONOS Germany.
So I was directed to this page: Optimizing MySQL/MariaDB Databases to Prevent Exceeding the Capacity Limit. (Factually, I was directed to the French version: Dépassement de capacité de la base de données MySQL ou MariaDB.)
The provided advice was useless. It doesn’t matter whether I use ALTER TABLE … FORCE or OPTIMIZE TABLE, the gains are minimal:
Also, typical for IONOS, whose stupid control panel (which is not cPanel!) has changed several times, and whose web interface sucks big time, not a single one of the indications from their help pages corresponds to the actual menus! In this case, there is no such thing as Hosting > Contract selection > Databases > Manage, or Hébergement > Sélection de contrats > Bases de données : Administrer in French. There’s absolutely no Hosting or Hébergement link, button, or menu entry! What does exist is my.ionos.fr/product-overview > Sites > Web et boutiques > Paramètres > Bases de données. These guys are completely retarded.
So what I was able to do was to reduce the total size of the DB, as reported by phpMyAdmin, from 137.1 MiB to 93.3 MiB. After a very long time, the occupied space reported by their control panel dropped from 1.44 GB to 1.26 GB.
This is beyond ridiculous. Something must be completely fucked-up.
But this is just a WordPress hosting offer, not a VPS, so I cannot investigate, nor can I change anything.
As a long-time WordPress user, I don’t remember when I switched from MyISAM to InnoDB. I hate both of them for different reasons, but I was happier with MyISAM. For instance, while using MyISAM, a database is one file, but with InnoDB, it can be one or many more files.
What I could notice here, by running SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'innodb%', is that the log file alone could reach 2 GB!
innodb_log_file_size 2147483648And I cannot change that. MariaDB is not “mine,” i.e. this is not a VPS.
I’m not the only one to have issues with IONOS. Here’s another complaint about the database size, also when hosted by IONOS.
It’s just impossible for a properly-configured database to need 1.26 to 1.44 GB to host the (compressed) text for about 250 posts and 1,000 comments! It just cannot be.
How can you store 100 MB in 1.3 GB, when the tables have been optimized?
How do I know when I reach 2 GB, so I’m fucked?
The reasonable thing to do is for me to change the hosting. But almost all of them are assholes. And I literally have better things to do with my life than to examine the misleading offers (e.g.: €4.95/mo in the first year, then €9.99/mo), then to migrate (exporting and importing in different configurations of such a stupid DB is risky), to manage the domain and especially the SSL certificate, and all such crap.
I just wanted a “set it and forget it” solution, but it looks like this isn’t possible with today’s ❶ technologies, ❷ companies, and ❸ assholes.
Beyond the fact that IONOS has no ticketing system (in 2024!), they are liars. I started with €2+VAT/month for the first year, then €4+VAT/month. Well, the second year was actually bumped up to €5+VAT/month. That’s €5.95, as the German 19% VAT is applied, not the French 20% one. But they can’t even guarantee the fees for the first year after the miraculously cheap starting year! This tells volumes about how little they care about their customers. But this is how all of them behave. Fuck them all.
I was happier with GeoCities. And it was plain HTML back then. Fuck PHP, fuck JS, fuck MySQL and MariaDB!
As a side note, fuck those snowflakes:
- Oh, the licensing is not good, we have to quit XFree86 and fork it into X.org!
- Oh, the devil has purchased the project, let’s quit OpenOffice.org and create LibreOffice!
- Oh, no, the devil has purchased MySQL too, so we need to create MariaDB!
Incidentally, InnoDB belongs to the same devil. And most MariaDB installations use InnoDB, not XtraDB. Yeah, InnoDB is dual-licensed, with one of the licenses being GPL. But so is MySQL, so where the fuck was the need for MariaDB?
Fucking retards. We cannot have quality in open-source software because of such dogmatic decisions, duplications, forks, waste of resources, since forever. More precisely, since Richard Stallman has masturbated and has released the GPL Version 1 (February 1989), then the GPL Version 2 (June 1991). A planet of idiots has then religiously observed the cult of GPL2, as if the BSD, the Apache, and other open-source licenses were not good. By the way, the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) completely reverses the spirit of the GPL, but who cares as long as it’s released by the proper Church and blessed by Pope Stallman, who cannot be wrong.
I still believe that only the BSD license is synonymous with freedom. GPL is more like Bolshevism. (The fact that corporations such as Intel, AMD, ARM, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Huawei, NVIDIA, Oracle, Meta, Sony are major contributors to the Linux kernel has nothing to do with the license; it has to do with the fact that they have chosen to use Linux and not FreeBSD or NetBSD. It’s that simple.)
I’m too old for this shit. 30+ years of such shit. Most software is increasingly sucking big time.
e.g. Infomaniak maybe?
What exactly do they mean by “from 5.75 € monthly”? I can’t see a clear price! When does it get more expensive than that? THEY’RE CHEATERS! I don’t have time to play charades! WHICH ARE THE DEFINITIVE FEES? They’re all fucktards.
Of course, it can be worse. Examples:
€5.49/mo. + VAT; after 12 months, it renews at €27.99/mo. + VAT.
$5.45/mo. + tax; after 12 months, it renews at $21.99/mo. + tax.
$9.95/mo. + tax; after 36 months, it renews at $25.99/mo. + tax.
And this one:
First Month $0.97/mo, Renews @ $12.95
First Month $1.50/mo, Renews @ $19.95
● Raidboxes has fixed pricing: €20/month + VAT, which is expensive for a non-monetizing blog. But on wordpress.org there is censorship, so I have to host my blog on paid hosting.
● 20i has “Unlimited Databases up to 5 GB each”, but the bandwidth is metered, and additional bandwidth usage is charged at £0.01 per GB used.
● The famous Hetzner… is too complicated. You have to install and manage WordPress yourself.
Everything Cloud is nowadays a massive cesspool. Everyone wants to host Kubernetes and shit. Millions of servers, God knows what for. Is our society a better one, with 10 to 20 million servers running shit, than it was 30 years ago?
I’m a true Luddite, you know.
● Oh, o2switch, “L’Hébergeur Web par Excellence!”. Pas de blague?!
This is misleading. Having HT and “tout compris” in the same phrase can make some people thing it’s TTC. Nope. It’s HT, so VAT will be added.
Then, I refuse to buy from shitheads who claim, “this offer is only valid for the next 0 days, 0 hours, etc.”
Finally, the payment is per year, so €60.48 TTC, or maybe €59.98 if they apply the German VAT instead of the French one, which isn’t guaranteed.
Subsequent years at 7×12 = €84 HT, so €100.8 TTC. For a fucking blog?
OK, “Espace Disque Illimité, Bande Passante et Trafic Illimités”…
● Krystal.io is relatively interesting, although the basic WordPress hosting (Amethyst or Ruby) doesn’t say whether the DB counts against the NVMe storage limits. The Base-level VPS (K1, K2) are also interesting, but I don’t want to spend money and time on such things. I just don’t.
● Funny thing, in the States, EIG bought a lot of web hosting companies, and they all went downhill after that. Many years ago, I used A Small Orange.
● WordPress on DreamHost:
– When paid for 3 years: $2.59/mo + tax, then “the price renews at the then-current rate (currently $5.99/mo)” + tax.
– When paid yearly: $2.95/mo + tax, then “the price renews at the then-current rate (currently $6.99/mo)” + tax.
– When paid monthly: $4.95/mo + tax; after 3 months, “the price renews at the then-current rate (currently $7.99/mo)” + tax.
Unmetered bandwidth, 50GB storage, and the DB doesn’t seem to have a size limit.
● Zume:
Website Hosting Lite: €7.50/mo VAT-included, but 10GB NVMe Storage is too low. The next level is €12.50/mo.
WordPress Lite: €3.5/mo billed annually at €42, but there aren’t enough technical details. I just cannot trust them.
Managed WordPress obviously is more expensive: Essential at €14.00/mo, but for 10GB NVMe. I was never able to understand why the fuck would anyone choose Managed WordPress and yes, I googled about that, and I even asked ChatGPT and Mistral. OK, Staging Environments are useful, but the rest is bollocks.
● Hostinger: “Claim Deal 00:20:14:18” (countdown). Shitheads. And it renews much more expensive.
● Nixihost: fuck, my head hurts. I’m sick of reading shitty plans and of scrolling down to read crap.
I did nor understand the last paragraph…
Not knowing anything of the difference of licensing schemes, I understand you claim BSD hold the spirit of open source better… but I get lost with saying GPL is “Bolshevism” and then you say those companies chose “Linux and not FreeBSD”. You mean Linux is all a variant of GPL and that is why they chose it over BSD licensing?
On the rest, I cannot agree more.
Oh, you did not take part in the religious wars of the last 30 years? So you don’t know that your software God should be GPL?
In brief:
1. GPL forces people to give back their changes to the community.
2. BSD doesn’t do that.
The dogma comes as follows: Linux is the successful OS that it is (at least, compared to FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD) because it uses GPL for a license. BSD allows people and companies (say, Apple) to take the code, make changes, and keep such changes to themselves.
I argue that this is not the case. Should the big names have chosen to support FreeBSD and NetBSD instead of Linux, things would have been different. I don’t believe that the licensing played a major role.
And there are many more open-source licenses.
he he… lat 30 yrs busy with other things! Thanks again for the time and concise explanation. But… again.. I am confused… “things would have been different”. How? Had they gone with any of the BSD they wouldn’t had need to contribute back so since big part of FOSS is contributed by salaried employees of those companies so FOSS would have been worse off without them? It seems you claim BSD is more free for sure but GPL is better for the community… is that it?!
GPL is indeed better for the community (at least in theory), but this talk is not about the contributions to projects such as LibreOffice or KDE (BTW, XFCE is practically not evolving since forever, except for the porting to Gtk3). Nobody dedicates salaried employees to such projects!
As a parenthesis, the two major open-source web servers, Apache’s httpd and Nginx, are not licensed under either the GPL or LGPL! The Apache 2.0 license doesn’t require the changes to be distributed, but if they are, the derivative works need not be released under the same license. And Nginx uses the 2-clause BSD license.
Back to operating systems, what they need is drivers. Drivers, drivers, drivers!
And I will reiterate it: nobody has been targeting the desktop users! In the 21st century, “desktop” mostly means “laptop,” unless we’re talking gaming or crypto mining.
If Linux has the best support for end-user consumer-grade hardware, this support is still incomplete when it comes to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and webcams (even scanners at some point). I have witnessed in the last three decades the pains of having a driver enter Linux. The manufacturers don’t give a shit, unless it’s a NIC for servers, or something similar. The European Union should have mandated drivers for at least another OS than Microsoft’s, but they didn’t. If the EU is dumb, someone else should have forced the hardware manufacturers to provide drivers: the United Nations, Hezbollah, I don’t care who.
If the support for Linux is selective, and only improved through the work of volunteers, the BSDs are much worse, but this cannot be attributed to their license not being GPL!
Very few companies support FreeBSD, and when they do, all they care is servers. The FreeBSD folks had no choice but to port drivers from Linux, which is far from being easy.
And NetBSD is practically nowhere. A niche OS with a tiny user base. OpenBSD lacks momentum also.
In a normal world:
– Everyone would have invested in NetBSD for embedded, IoT, and “exotic” platforms, including the “raspberry-banana fruit salad.”
– Everyone would have invested in FreeBSD for servers. However, because a server OS rarely stays on servers only (even WinNT 4.0 Server had a Workstation counterpart), this would have helped with its desktop usage too. Maybe less on laptops, but if FreeBSD gained momentum on desktop PCs, we’d have much more software available for FreeBSD.
– As a flexible OS, Linux would have had its glory on desktops and laptops, but also on servers, in containers, in VMs, and so on. It was meant to provide a UNIX-like OS to the IBM PC platform, but the home users are those who are neglected in the first place!
Mark Shuttleworth cared about the PC users in 2004. To date, Intel, Broadcom, Realtek, MediaTek, and many, many others, still don’t. Acer, ASUS, HP, Dell, Lenovo, MSI, Samsung, and whoever else still makes laptops today are putting in their laptops the latest crap of a chip that is $0.005 cheaper than the previous one, without caring that the only driver that exists is for Win10 or Win11.
How does this have anything to do with GPL? It ain’t. For the powers that be, “consumer hardware == Windows” and “server hardware == Linux”. GPL didn’t even help Linux that much.
BTW, AppImages, Flatpaks and snaps only run under Linux. FreeBSD might be able to run some AppImages designed for Linux, but only as much as Linuxulator can help with that. So the “oh-so-generous because GPL” Linux people have solved the “dependency hell” for Linux and Linux only.
Fully understood now!
I feel both honored of such as extensive answer and shame from taking that much time… Thanks so much!