ALLGBMINI

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.