This week was the perfect storm of poor web hosting. It has been over three years since I last fired a web host. This week I’ve already fired two and will be firing another one shortly.
Pair.com – Let me start by saying that if you are a scripting PHP guru, Pair.com is a good host. However, if you are a regular user, don’t expect any help from these arrogant pricks. This week I asked a simple request to allow my blog to perform auto-installs of updated versions. It works here on CriticalMAS, so it should work there. Something on their server was blocking it. They referred me to the WordPress development team. Huh? It is a working feature. You are sending your customer to the development team of WordPress when the problem is clearly with your server?
Joe from Artlung (Pair customer and scripting guru) was able to show me a tech note written by Pair themselves that addressed the problem and the fix. The tech note was quite technical. It has been 12 years since I last wrote any UNIX scripting, so I barely understood what they were talking about. But, why am I doing this work? I’m the customer, they are tech support. After a few emails back and forth, it became clear that they refused to help me and I refused to learn Linux scripting.
Fired!
DreamHost – I have to say I love their interface and I was able to build out a website faster than I ever have with any other web host. So far so good. I publish my first post and the server crashes. After 40 minutes, they respond to my support request and the server is back up and running.
A mere 12 hours later, I’m back working on the site and it crashes again. I requested to be moved to a new server, as it is clear someone on my server is getting a high amount of traffic and my box can’t handle the load. Although they got the server up and running quickly, they denied my request to be moved without explanation.
How do they offer such cheap web hosting? They pack sites onto shared server tighter than the slave ship Amistad. I simply have no confidence or patience in DreamHost.
Fired!
MyDomain – My Domain is my registrar and they do a great job managing my domains. I’m very happy with them. So happy, I violated one of my golden rules. Never host a web site with your registrar. You always want the freedom to fire either part without having any downtime. It is possible, but the odds of something going wrong increase.
I decided to build out a little more content for MichaelAllenSmith.com, so I fired up their panel. Expired certificates 404 errors and database problems. I emailed a request to support. That was 3 days ago. No response. I got bigger projects to deal with now, so I’ll return to deal with this later.
(soon to be) Fired!
By next week CoffeeHero will be on the same server as CriticalMAS. I really wanted to find a second host that I could trust. Have I mentioned that Setting Up a Blog is Still a Painful Process?
UPDATE (4/14/2009): I’ve decided to give DreamHost one more chance.
I take it this explains why I can’t access coffee hero? Been trying all morning to no avail.
Yep. DREAMHOST sucks!!! I just sent another support request.
Have you tried 1and1.com hosting?
They advertise heavily in entrepreneuer and several techie nerd magazines. I have no idea why they named themselves like they do, but it might be worth a try.
No. I prefer not to host where the masses go. Plus I haven’t heard anything good about them.
Sorry to hear your bad experience with Pair. I’ve only ever had excellent service with them.
But I do understand that they will not hold my hand. They’re a gym that is not going to pick up the weights for me.
Interesting analogy. Apparently, they are a gym that isn’t going to spot you when you need to lift a heavy weight off your chest either.