Tami Weiss

Hello,

I am a web designer and sometimes developer in the Milwaukee area. I created beautiful, standards compliant webpages that are not only usable, but deliciously delightful. Check out my portfolio.

• Finding quality webhosting is a pain

  October 15th, 2009

  There is nothing more frustrating in the world than having to change web hosts. It is, quite frankly, a pain in the ass.

  Dreamhost was/is my current hosting provider, and I have been having a lot of problems with their service. They will say nothing is wrong but you can see people tweeting an outage (the first real use for twitter!) My account suddenly runs out of resources and they start pushing their private server solution, even though I rarely get 100 visitors a day. Yes, this seemed mighty suspicious to me too, as I hadn’t changed anything recently and only as a fluke noticed my site was unresponsive. When the first answer from their support was I should upgrade to their more expensive account option, I get suspicious. I also find other tales describing the same thing. So its time for a new web host.

  The problem is, there are very few good review sites, most affiliates that earn commission on referring sales, so its extremely difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. And even those that seem legit, finding relevant reviews is an equality difficult task. Most people are happy with their service until it goes down. So many reviews tend to be glowing until something goes wrong. Even a moderately competent host will keep things running smoothly most of the time, so ferreting out whether a service is acceptable or not is an arduous task.

  I decided to do a search on webhostingtalk.com to try to find a good host. The same issues applied, too much chatter, not enough good solid information. It also doesn’t help that with reseller hosting, virtual private servers, cheap colocation services and cheap outsourcing of IT staff that there are a billion providers out there.

  Eventually I settle on an igxhost reseller account because it has all the features I want and I can’t find anything bad about it. Three weeks into it, they have a scheduled maintenance that goes poorly and takes down most of their sites for a day. When they’re restored, my recent changes are lost. A day and a half of back and forth and they restore everything.

  That was maybe a month ago. Yesterday I receive an email that they are doing “planned maintenance” on the site this coming monday at 9pm which will take all the sites down on the server for an hour. Now, any web host worth their salt will not take a site down for any length of time if they can help it, and certainly not outside the wee morning hours of 12am to 4am.

  So, its time to find new hosting again.

  This is a process I do not look forward to repeating again. At least I had the good sense to only put a few sites there while trying it out rather than all of them. On the other hand, I’m now paying for two web hosting accounts I find unacceptable.

  
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