So I recently wrote all about how this website is maintained, and sang the praises of 1and1 (masses of storage, 10 times more bandwidth than I need, and all the features I am ever likely to need).
So of course they immediately respond by failing a total of three times in January for many hours at a time! Down enough that at least two people (apart from me) noticed and commented on it.
1and1 has no support/status page – you can send an email if you wish; each time I did that I got a reply (typically the next day) saying “all is well now”. No explanation of what was wrong …
You can also phone their support line (a recent innovation for them); the last time I did that I was on hold for more than half an hour and when I finally got through, my web site had just recovered so I got the same “all is well” response. I ranted, and was told something about a raid failure – but that was the same excuse used a week earlier to cover a six+ hour failure.
So I won’t put up with it any more. After some research, I am switching to PowWeb (the same hosting company used by Gabe Bridgers MotoringFile); this company makes a feature of their technology which ensures your website will experience virtually no downtime ….
There is also a PowWeb forum where issues can be discussed – apparently there is no censoring by PowWeb; indeed there are announcements of issues and ongoing maintenance & improvements.
Of course (refer to the subject of this post), last night when I was testing everything I started to get lots of “500 Internal Server Error” messages on php web pages – but I realised it was not my own mistake when I saw the same on MotoringFile and on another PowWeb hosted site … a quick use of their online chat confirmed that PowWeb had a problem, but were working on it (all is well again today).
So it seems that I will never find a reliable web hosting company – but I prefer one that admits problems to one that cannot be contacted.
M&I / GBMINI 
Well how about that, when I mentioned PowWeb the other day I had no idea Gabe uses it as well. Good endorsement.
The service I’m currently using, halfpricehosting is pretty expensive…..about $140 annually for a MS environment, more than that for a Linux environment.
But….in over 8 years of hosting w/ them I’ve never had problems. And, you get 24 hour LIVE PERSON support, toll-free. I guess if you were a commercial site you’d really appreciate that. But, it’s overkill for my needs, I just throw pics up etc, and can deal w/ occasionally outages.
Did you drive the MCS auto at MoP?
chris
Chris,
When my company started hosting, we paid $29/month; my first site was $17/month and now for less than $10/month you get a lot of hosting. I guess that is market forces 😉
I seriously looked at “managed servers” but at $40/month or more they are still too expensive unless I wanted to start re-selling 😉
No, I did not drive the auto MCS – it is a customer order; MINI Peabody don’t get a demo for a few weeks … looking forward to a chance to try one though!
I have similiar problems with my current host. When the site is up it runs great, but when they go down it’s usually for an extended period of time. On the plus side, they are quick to answer emails and they just set up a spiffy little status page that kinda helps a little bit.
Ian – just think, about 10 years ago, it was over $100 to register a domain name. Just last week, I registered four new domains for $4.98/year through Yahoo. Still blows me away. I would have registered more if I could have thought of more things I wanted.
As for reliable hosting, I use http://www.bluecapacity.com. They are very reasonable and in the two years I’ve been using them, I have never experience a server outage. However, like you said, “not everything can be perfect.” Their customer support is not all too special. They have AIM support, email, and emergency phone. I am still a newbie in coding so I needed a lot of help getting Movable Type going. But once I was able to get in touch with someone, they fixed my issues quickly. I’ve considered switching to PowWeb and will consider them when my contract is up. I’ll wait to see what kind of experience you have with them. Gabe’s site always seems to be running good, unless he is fixing something.
Congrats Ian! While I can’t say I haven’t cursed Powweb once or twice in the past two years they have always been repsonsive and eager to help. Could their service be better… sure. Is it an incredible value for your money… yes.
Good luck with the move.
I am a huge fan of icdsoft.com, I have three domains with them, never been a single downtime in 4 years and they respond to all support requests within 5 minutes of submission. And just $60 a year. Pretty basic features though I have WordPress, UltimateBB and other home brewed Perl/PHP hosted with them.
Thanks all … my web site is using 850MB today so icdsoft would not suit me.
But, Ryan, bluecapacity looks interesting – a good range of packages at good prices.
But I hope I don’t need to move again any time soon; they don’t make it easy do they! 😉
One other thing … bluecapacity has a “speed test” link on their home page. I just tried it and was getting 60KB/sec download.
Doing the same on PowWeb/GBMINI, I am getting >180KB/sec – three times faster!
Don’t know if you get posts of all the comments everyday, but it seems that this new host (or a change in coding) now loads the whole blog page into this small comments window when I post a comment. I’m using Safari on a Mac… anyone else see it..?
OK. Finally found some hints in the MoveableType documentation, and made the suggested fixes – I think all is OK now.
MT v3.xx has done some BIG changes with comments, primarily to address spam protection. Seems they also chose to revert to inline comments instead of pop-up.
Discovered “I prefer to use pop-up comments instead of inline comments. How do I switch back in 3.x?” in the MT knowledge base, and followed what it said …
Ian, can you host more than one domain name with POWeb?
You can “sort of” host multiple domains on PowWeb, but 1and1 is much better for that.
With PowWeb you can set up “pointer domains” which come to the SAME web site; with some complexity you can edit “.htaccess” files so that the different domains have different directories/pages (see here).
There is discussion about this on the PowWeb forums including complaints that email is “broken” for “pointer domains”.
I still have MINIsOnTop and another site on 1and1 – and they are down again today! A couple of hours so far, and I discover that their phone support is weekdays only so no way to find out what is going on this time.
1and1 is doing everything it can to annoy me 😦