Website/Hosting

The seemingly never-ending saga of good web hosting continues … regular readers might remember my moving GBMINI from 1and1 to PowWeb (because of repeated outages with 1and1); then when PowWeb in turn failed repeatedly, I moved once again to InMotionHosting …

Now I know that web sites sometimes fail (even MINI2 failed recently) but there is occasional failure and then there is repeated failure – and there is also a difference between responsiveness and silence … both 1and1 and PowWeb failed repeatedly and handled the issues very poorly.

So tonight, GBMINI went down. I tried to visit the InMotionHosting support page but that was down too!
So I phoned their support number … and immediately got through to a REAL PERSON; he told me that they were aware of problems and were working on them. He then asked for my name & phone number and said he would call back to confirm when everything was sorted out.
Everything was sorted out, and he did call back – that is the sort of outage response that those other hosting companies should aspire to.

There is a great web site, FindMyHosting, which helped me find InMotionHosting – for every hosting company they have a detailed feedback page and uptime statistics. They show InMotionHosting to be reliable and well rated. My experience also shows them to be excellent for tech support.

Back in the mists of ancient internet (around 1996-7) I was a devout AltaVista user but some time (!) between then and now I switched to Google (amazed just now to discover that AltaVista still exists – seems to be part of Yahoo now)
Google seems to almost always give relevant search results, and with its image searching and the new customisable news page, it is my home page too.

Earlier this year, having read about Google AdSense, I decided to experiment with it on GBMINI (you might have noticed).
So now that Google has had a little box here for nearly three months, what have I discovered?
Firstly, it is interesting to see when Google discovers “a topic it likes” on my web pages, and generates what might be useful ad links. My recent alarm install for example, or a much older article about rear fog lights.
It gives some insight into the technology behind Google – because all those web pages had to be indexed and “understood” in order to give “relevant” ad links.
On the other hand, there are an awful lot of generic “MINI” ads (presumably because I did not write anything “interesting”!)

If you are wondering about making your fortune with Google AdSense, you will need a much more popular web site than mine … GBMINI has raised a grand total of $10.55 in three months (maybe Gabe Bridger does better on MotoringFile)! Since Google does not pay out below $100, I won’t be looking for a check any time soon 😉

As I posted before, nothing is perfect …
I was frustrated back in January by repeated down time from 1and1 and a lack of support feedback. MotoringFile is hosted on PowWeb and always seemed reliable (checking with Gabe confirmed that) so I switched. Apparently I chose the exact moment to switch when PowWeb decided to go for broke … and break things 😦
First, PowWeb had many issues with their recent “load balancing” which caused server problems and PHP issues (see here). Then more recently their MySQL server has been sick for more than a week, causing delays and failures to post on my weblog – both for me and for people trying to comment.

So I am moving GBMINI once again 😉
This time I have chosen InMotionHosting; I found some good indications of very low downtime from them, and they have an interesting Virtual Private Server package which offers me nearly my own computer on the web.
So far, it has been extremely quick during testing. There were a couple of issues that stumped me for a while, but tech support has been fast and accurate in its replies – this gives me great encouragement!

For example, There was no ImageMagick or NetPBM image libraries, so I could not run Gallery; I contacted them and after a discussion, they provided GCC (a compiler) so that I was able to install ImageMagick by compiling the source (first time I have ever done such in a Unix environment – and relatively pain-free!)
So perhaps the image libraries should have been available already, but the quick & useful support largely makes up for that …

Anyway, hopefully I have made the right decision in switching hosts again. I am paying more per month but maybe you get what you pay for. Readers will be the judge.
The name servers will be propagating over the next few days – when you see the InMotionHosting logo bottom right (instead of the PowWeb one) you know you are on the new hosting …