I've been having one or two problems with my web-hosting provider. This time six months ago, I was lavishing praise upon them for being very reliable, but not long after that things started getting worse. Aside from a general increase in unreliability, there were a number of pretty significant problems.
- I discovered, the hard way, that their disk quotas were hard limits
- The machine I was being hosted on was very slow for a week, which meant half the time my weblog wouldn't rebuild properly when I posted
- Their solution to this problem was to move me to another machine... without letting me know the IP address or timing in advance. Which meant the morning after the switch, I woke up to find myself stuck with a severely broken DNS record.
- For several weeks, I could only sporadically access my own webpage from home. The problem turned out to be Qwest over-enthusiastically blocking ICMP, which killed Path MTU Discovery. As far as I can tell, they only worked this out after I politely suggested it might be the problem.
- Only days after they'd recovered from this long and significant outage they sent me an invoice.
There's bad timing, and there's bad timing. So yes, I think it's time to move on. I'm in the process of setting up MT on the new provider, and taking the opportunity to fix a few of the things that are more egregiously wrong with my blog. Hopefully I can drop the TTL down and get the DNS to switch over more smoothly this time, except for Javablogs which will, of course, continue caching the old IP until it is next rebooted, regardless of TTL..
Anyway, today my blog was unreachable from about 9am, and continued to be so all day. At about 6:30pm, I gave their support number a ring, ready to finally tell them just how pissed off I was at the service, outages, and general pile of annoyance I had experienced.
Well, I was about to. Then the lady on the other end of the line told me about the fire that completely shut down their co-lo. Ouch. I feel a bit guilty now.
Might I suggest, for hosting, either of the following two options:
http://www.ehostsource.com OR
http://www.be-hosted.com
ehostsource seems to have slightly better deals than be-hosted, but both have been very highly praised by friends of mine, and I myself am currently with be-hosted. :)
If you have other options in mind, though, that's cool. I do believe that both have MySQL, PHP 4. ehostsource has 50gb of transfer, 500mb of storage, stats, toll-free support, etc. And, is very reasonably priced.
Just thought I'd make the suggestion. ;)
Just get an adsl account with some reasonable bandwidth limits, a dyndns account, and old box and host it u'rself :)
I'm from AVS Networks and yes - we had major problems this year. We did our best to get this problems resolved but because Telstra outsources everything to contractors and we need to colo our servers, we are at the mercy of a number of companies.
The Telstra problem which existed for two weeks was due to - as you siad, all ICMP being blocked. From a technical point of view, it was a stupid mistake by Qwest. No one from Telstra and subsidiary ISPs were able to access AVS Networks and many other US networks. After a week of absolutely hounding Telstra and getting one step from Ziggy, the finally recognised where the problem was after a number of our customers were even telling us where the problems existed. We were pretty pissed about the whole situation but it was out of our control.
Then we had another blow with the fire in the building. Talk about blow after blow this year. There was a fire in the same building as our servers and they were ordered to shutdown all the power in the building - even redundant power ?!?! You couldn't imagine how pissed off we were now but we now have independent redundant power to our servers.
We've implement hard disk quotas because customers do not do anything about it when they are over quota. Our support would have to clean out customer accounts. We have all the alarm software that other hosting companies have but we can always increase quotas manually if customers give us a call and then we get the system to remove the quota 48 hours afterwards.
I admit that the slow server problem was a bad resolution and you should have been told more about the procedure of having the site moved. If you like, I will give you back you old IP address if it is not being used but I don't think it's really going to help the situation here.
Please understand where we are coming from when we have thousands of accounts to look after. If we stop the billing and invoicing, our accounts would be a mess very quickly. Looking after sites for web hosting is easy for the first few hundred but once you get past that mark, there's alot more work. We all work hard here at AVS and we can't keep everyone happy all the time.
I hope you will understand our position and it looks like you will go onto hosting your own box. I think that's a great idea and it's more rewarding then someone else hosting you site.
Cheers,
Nigel