Aug 10
Sorry for the down-time
2006 at 09.57 pm posted by Veerle
First of all let me apologize for the downtime earlier today. As it turns out there was some sniffer program on or watching the server to scan for passwords. Don’t ask me how it came there in the first place since I am not a technical person and I certainly didn’t put it there. It is the second time since the launch of my redesign that I had major down-time.
So I am on the look out for a new hosting partner so that this doesn’t happen anymore in the future. With moving to another physical location some more down-time will be needed until name servers are updated. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience that this may have caused and I’ll do anything in my limited powers to prevent this from happening again. Any hosting horror stories to share to make me feel better? :)
45served
1
Just don’t buy into all the stories about Dreamhost. It’s an awful company with a horrible track record. The only reason they are famous is because they pay such incredible referral fees, so people will say anything to get you there.
As for a good company? asmallorange.com. 5 years. 0 downtime. Now that’s a record worth talking about. They only take on new sites when they know they can take care of them, amazing customer service, technology up the wazoo and it’s run by smart people.
Good luck finding something though!
2
I use 1&1;not a bad company and zero downtime in the last 2 years but I don’t have the traffic you do.
3
Yes! I’m literally still reeling from an awful hosting experience over the last month which has scared the hell out of me.
I used to be with Pipex hosting here in the UK - not bad I suppose but very expensive, sluggish support.
So I went shopping early in the year and went with Site5 in the end. Loads of really great features, stacks of space, more bandwidth than I’d know what to do with, very very very cheap indeed… woooo hooooo!!!!
Er… except that it’s all gone sour. My server has experienced 3 very serious and far-reaching hacker attacks within the last month; suddenly support is poor if almost non-existent ; obviously very poor security; most of the fancy features actually never work… I could go on.
So both myself and my clients are very fed up indeed.
In a bid to make it never ever happen again, I’ve realised the hard way that you get what you pay for. I just last night signed up with SegPub and I can honestly say I’m absolutely delighted. Not cheap. Only reasonable amount of space and bandwidth. Yet I’m suddenly very happy indeed! I’ve had phenomenal support already, my sites are suddenly loading amazingly fast and I’m so happy I could actually cry : )
(When you almost lose 25 of your client’s sites to a stupid hacker it can make you very emotional indeed!)
Best of luck with your search!
4
Veerle, if you’re looking for a new provider, I use Pixeldesign, located in Erpe-Mere. Small company, but always very helpful, skilled in many areas, and maybe most important of all: they offer Mac hosting ! Well, I don’t know about your traffic volume, but I guess it doesn’t hurt to ask.
Good luck !
5
Another vote for SegPub here! It’s a great place with lots of friendly people… The support is phenomenal and it’s a thrill to know that your site could be sitting next to Hicksdesign :-)
6
Yeah, Dreamhost is not to great.
I’m on it right now, and the downtime is pretty bad.
I think I’m going to switch to (mt) Media Temple soon.
Veerle, what host are you using right now?
7
What to think of this > TextDrive!
8
For my personal sites, and sites I run for friends, I use PHPWebHosting, and they are pretty darn good in terms of speed and uptime, but a little slow when trying to troubleshoot an issue.
For professional sites, and I’ve started to lean towards them for some personal stuff as well, is pMachineHosting. Regardless of Expression Engine, they are great, but especially in regards with EE. I think it’s because they don’t store the MySQL database on the same machine as the website, so both machines are properly optimized for maximum performance. Who knows? Nevin, has gone over some of the optimizing techniques in the pMachine Forums, but I have to say the proof is in the pudding.
I started by moving a client that ran their own server on a pipeline that was slightly faster than a T1 and their web response time was horrendous. I moved them to pMachine, and even the most complicated pages render in .2-.8 seconds, unless they are displaying thousands of records. And to date, no downtime.
I’ve since moved four other clients and one of my private sites over. They really are very good; and I admit to like knowing that my ISP is also tooling around in my CMS software forums, learning from the issues that individuals are having at other hosts, and even helping them attempt to resolve them. They’ve been super responsive when I’ve wanted to add domains, subdomains, access Urchin, or need to restore something etc.
I highly recommend pMachineHosting; for the clients that I moved there, my time spent troubleshooting hosting issues has been reduced to practically nil, love that
9
Great timing with this post, albeit due to unfortunate hosting mishaps, sorry to read about this, Veerle. :o(
I am looking at changing hosts in the near future, too. I’ve been with Lunarpages for years, and their outages are getting more frequent as of late… not exactly great for a guy that makes his living in the e-commerce space.
I’ve heard a lot of folks use Dreamhost - and was about to sign up today - but after reading this post I will refrain and keep exploring my options.
Good luck to Veerle and any others on the mission of trying to find that reliable, supportive web host!
10
I haven’t had any trouble with Dreamhost other than just recently before then I might have had my e-mail go down at random, but that was about it. Oh my Jabber server went down once (whoopdedoo!) I personally haven’t seen a company as supportive as Dreamhost is other than Media Temple. When I moved to Dreamhost I was going to choose between the two, but when I saw how much control I had over my particular website with Dreamhost I chose it. I like the freedom I have with my server. I can install pretty much what I like, and I do just that.
I’ve heard some horror stories, but I just haven’t experienced those yet.
11
I signed up with Dreamhost after reading the many recommendation on websites but I was very cautious due to how much they offered. Generally, if something sounds too good to be true, it generall is. Nonstop problems, from the day I signed up. The website worked well enough, and only ever had issues viewing the site once, but email was a constant problem for me. Thankfully, I had the 97 day money back guarantee, so I moved onto Media Temple instead and haven’t had a single issue with their service. Excellent support staff and perfect hosting/email.
12
I usually just read your blog but after reading the comments about Site5 I had to leave a comment. I’ve had some great experience with site5 to date, I feel very well looked after, recently I had an issue that couldn’t be dealt with by their ordinary support so I contacted the company owner directly using his personal email address (freely available on their site). He dealt with my problem very quickly and even took the time to follow up once it was complete to ensure everything was ok.
If your interested in the quality of Site5’s hosting, awhile ago I built a utility to track the status of the server I’m on, it’s updated every five minutes and you can see a live report here: http://iseestars.net/site5/server/oracle/1/ to see it for your own server simply replace oracle with the server name.
13
We just revamped our hosting-offers. Check out our hosting offer. We are located in Gent, run our own network etc. We’d be happy to offer you a test account if you want to try our service.
14
I used to be with Pipex but suffered from bad support and downtime. Just moved my sites to textdrive, so far so good.
15
In response to both your blog Veerle and to Julians comment above (#6).
I’ve been with (mt) Media Temple now for some time and I am well pleased with their service. I’ve used their support quite a few times and they are very quick and proffessional in all responses. (mt) will also lauch a complete facelift on all their shared server customers anytime soon which will be really cool by the looks of it. There’s more information about this on their website.
16
I have an account at Dreamhost, but I’m not running a company. I don’t think I’ve had any major downtime yet.
I’d suggest TextDrive or Media Tempel.
I also came across Steelpixel in my bookmarks, it might be worth checking it out.
17
If you can handle your host being in North America I vote for Media Temple. Great service and support and 0 downtime. (I’m in the UK).
18
I’ve been pretty happy with Dreamhost. No downtime except the major power outage they had in the area.
MediaTemple gave me a lot more problems, going down all the time, not able to connect to FTP....
19
Currently I am using Dreamhost as well. I love their flexibility to configure in the CP and the space/bandwidth are generous but email is somewhat problematic. Overall, I think they are pretty big now so their services are somewhat luke warm.
I am looking into Mosso Hosting, http://www.mosso.com/ . They look like a pretty good candidate for me to switch to. Does anyone has any experience with them?
20
I kind of got landed in the hosting business a couple of years ago… a friend was going to host a site for me for a relatively cheap cost, then just before it was due to launch decided he didn’t want to deal with having a server any more, I was in a jam.
Looking around there was no way I was going to find hosting for the same price my friend was going to charge me, so I offered to buy his box… he accepted and the darn thing failed two days after I took over it. He was nice about it though and gave me my money back.
I went out and bought my own server, an Apple Xserve which sits in the Melbourne Stock Exchange building here is Australia. Been picking up small customers to help offset the cost of it being there.
Nothing beats having your very own server and you can often get co-location space pretty cheap these days.
Spose it’s not a good solution though ifdon’t want the hassle of chasing up accounts when they don’t pay or you don’t make money from your site.
21
You see this type of post all over the net. “I need to switch hosting because of...”
Then a barrage of comments from people defending and praising their webhost as if it’s their integrity is being put on the line.
Its like a car. 2 identical brand new cars leave the showroom floor. 1 drives forever without a sniff of a problem, and the other, a complete dud.
You are never going to find a host that has 100% uptime with not 1 unhappy customer.
So find a host thats honest, is large enough to cope , and has a decent track record when it comes to support. If a couple of gremlins creep in here and there (not monthly problems :-)), then so what. If they can sort it out and are honest enough to tell you what was wrong and how they intend for it not to happen again, then that’s exactly what you should looking for.
22
My humble impression is that Veerle’s point has gone missing so far: she only asked to hear hosting horror stories and everybody has gone crazy with recommendations! I guess it is only human never to miss a chance to do some good (or bad marketing)…
23
Well, webware.be will fit your needs. This hosting company is located in Zaventem and is connected with the fastest network in Belgium (you can check that out, Webware was many times the first one on the list).
You can even get ssh access!
24
My experiences with Textdrive have been far from great; while their staff is highly proficicient and their gear is top notch I experienced a lot of downtime. Besides from growing pains, it seems the stability suffered a lot because people were running Rails applications in development mode and such.
A Small Orange on the other hand, has proven to be a solid partner. Their uptime is excellent and support is great. I had a VPS running there for quite some time. The only reason I switched is that I wanted a dedicated box for my upcoming Rails projects (which take quite some resources).
I’ve heard some horror stories about 1and1 though. See here and here. Definately NOT the way to go.
25
I’ll give you a ‘horror’ story. I have a lot of sites hosted at Powweb. Everything has been working fine, I was very please with them (although I read a lot of bad things about Powweb). Anyway, now they are switching servers, and they made a mistake with the PHP compilation. The sites on the new platform will not be able to use the cURL. This means that my osCommerce sites, using PayPal, will not be able to handle transactions via PayPal. My client will be so delighted :-)
So I am on the look for a new one, just contacted siteground.com, looked fine from a first point of view.
I got cold sweat on my back when I read about this issue !
Cheers,
M
26
I also would recommend 1and1 hosting they have nice prices and so far zero down time. Just giving you my two cents worth as well.
27
I used go with Lunarpages and 1&1;, and had a lot of issues with both. 1&1;is simply horrible, bad support, lots of issues, dropped it as soon as possible. I went with Lunarpages for a while, they were not that bad at first, I had two dedicated servers there. Then they started crashing or losing connection about twice every month. Dropped them after three months, just couldn’t take the stress.
Now I am with Media Temple, have been using their service for four months, the best service and administration system I have ever seen. If they keep it up, I will never use any other hosting provider, I recommend it.
28
I highly reccomend Media Temple. I’ve used a number of hosts over the past couple of years and none of them have come close.
Their admin interface is refined, they keep their servers tight and they notify you of regular maintenance. Oh, and I’ve never had problems with downtime. ;-)
29
do you need dedicated or shared? if you need dedicated go with the planet. 5 datacenters, now merged with ev1, tipping point network-wide. more bandwidth than you can shake a stick at, blisteringly quick support (ive had tickets responded, fixed and dealt with in the past in under 10 minues), ok pricing, 24/7 365 sales and tech support.
i dont work for them, just a very happy customer for over 2 years.
30
Wow a password sniffer on your site… that is a horror story! I would say that your ISP is not too hip on security. It was kind of interesting to visit your “crippled” site yesterday… we were able to traverse your directory structure for a short time...then poof you were back on-line just i was about to notify you. As to horror story i once help a local organization who lost all their data and website when their ISP went “south” and were never heard from again. Their backup was on the ISP server :-( Now they backup locally!
As to new ISP: textdrive is so web 2.0 and pMachinehosting is also vEEry cool
31
Another vote here for pmachine hosting. I’m currently considering switching a few EE sites over to them and even my pre-sales questions were answered very quickly and clearly; Nevin is just a fanatic!
32
My experience with TextDrive was far from good… and I mean a long long way from good.
My Hosts of choice are SegPub and merlan.co.uk
33
I used to be hosted by a little company called ‘WebSpaceDepot.net’ and you wouldn’t believe how much downtime I had in the two months I was hosted by them! They never replied to my emails and support tickets.
Right now I’m with UOindustries.com..they’re good. I don’t know how much bandwidth your site uses though, if you use a lot you should get a reseller, haha.
On an unrelated note: I love your website design! It’s always nice to see fellow Dutch/Belgian person ^^
34
My website is currently running on a server provided by Host Europe and I’m really happy there. I had also great experiences with 1&1;. No downtime, friendly service and the best control panel I have ever seen. But they are no as cheap as the most other hosts.
35
godaddy.com has been good to me for 2 years. Sorry, no horror stories.
36
I can confirm that Dreamhost is actually a “Nightmare Host”.
I am working on a webapplication and know a lot of experiences from our users about their hosters. Most of them are using HostGator and all are delighted of their service. I used it too and it’s really good. The second best that I have tried is Site5, even if Dave Foy (Post 3) had a bad experience with them.
Boby
37
i use hostgator. they’re pretty good.
38
I’d recommend reading this forum to get some idea of the quality of web hosts out there:
webhostingtalk.com
39
(mt) are totally awesome, no down-time, support response in about 30 minutes… who could ask for more? www.mediatemple.net.
Use them! Use them!
40
Horror hosting problem? Yes, I got one right now. I’ve registered a hosting and domain name in Kraja (czech hosting) and after about a month they send me message that they are shutting down the system and we have to look for new partner.
So I did, but bank transaction last till now. It is more than a week. Thanks to banks in Slovakia.
So, my homepage is down for a while (probably now too). Think that would do better mood for you.
41
I’m with AGN Solutions. There hasn’t been any down time since I switched and the support is great. They even talk to you over AIM, MSN, and whatever else you have. Very good hosting company.
42
I have to throw my vote in for (mt) Media Temple. Great customer service, they are tight on security and I know the shared servers can handle some traffic. The company I work for hosts a very heavily-trafficed site there.
Also, I think I saw somewhere that Gap, Old Navy, etc host with them as well. Can’t be too bad if that is indeed true.
43
FIRST HORROR STORY
This is a very long horror story, so get your pop-corn and get comfortable.
Once upon a time I created a website, hosted into an italian provider, this site was all black&red;for my client pleasure. During a sunny saturday afternoon I was preparing myself to go out, my phone rang and I answered.
The voice told me: “we got a problem, we can’t go through our site!” Houston we got a problem...
“Damn!” I said.
So I opened my browser and went to ‘our’ website. The home page was replaced by a laconic “Under maintenance” message. Underwhat?!
I logged in with ftp and I realized that all index.php pages were deleted! Later, through other people I’ve found that the problem was related to the server, not only to my client website.
Finally, we/I wrote to support service, but we never got an answer by them. Fortunately we (always me) got a backup and went up ‘quickly’.
This was happening almost a year ago, since then I haven’t had any other problem with this provider.
SECOND HORROR STORY
One of my friends last month found in his images directory a strange php file, he asked me to look it, and so I did, it was a russian shell script named *.NIX REMOTE WEB-SHELL v.0.4a Pro. And, I know, you don’t care but it was another saturday, sob.
I tested the script on my machine: I could write, modify and delete any file on my directories. I’ve could also upload and download anything so I kept the file to learn something about all that code! ^_^
The moral of these stories is: never, NEVER, stay near a phone or a computer during weekends! Go out, relax and smile, always! ;p
P.S. after all, I hate saturdays.. =|
44
I could recommend ace-host.net
Great plan ... $5/mo ... $145 for 3 yrs, unlimited mysql, email, ftp, subdomains etc etc, 5gb webspace, 100gb b’width, email support normally responds in a min’s time. 5 mins at the max I have experienced.
Horror story ... once during a migration, the RAID on a server failed, resulting in a loss of data for everyone on that server.
Other than that ... no problems. Very good service.
45
There are many websites that no one would even notice their presence, even if they are 100% uptime, while few minutes of down time for a website as this one may concern many people. Such experiences let people measure the actual popularity of their websites.