My Web Hosting Nightmare

So, about two weeks ago I had a revelation. You see, according to a web site I found (sorry don’t have the link) a computer running 24/7 can average about $30/mo in electricity. I had been running my own web server at my house because I thought it was cheaper than paying someone to host all of my sites. It was a reasonable assumption, after all, I wasn’t paying a monthly hosting fee was I? Well, obviously I ended up paying MORE in electricity. So, being the frugal minded person I am, I decided to shut down my server and go with a hosting company.

I’ve tried many different companies over the years, and there was a really good offer over at netfirms.com that offered 1.5 terabytes of bandwidth a month. PERFECT for podcasting. I signed up, ave my credit card and started building my sites. Around Thursday the 13th I got a voice mail at home saying I needd to call the billing department to verify the order. Ok, that was weird, I mean I gave a credit card. But I tried to call on Friday, and was on hold for 20 minutes.

I was getting new carpet installed on Monday (another long blog post coming on that!) so my computers were unhooked from Sunday – Monday night. Now, I had setup all of my important web sites on the new server, including some pretty heavy installations of the gallery script, links script, and other things that took a lot of time. So imagine my astonishment when I received an email asking if I knew my sites were down.

Wha huh?

Yep, it was true. Because I didn’t call back within 3 days they erased everything I had built from the tuesday before – the saturday. Everything. Gone. Goodbye. I was NOT happy. Calls to their technical support line were met with “sign up for another account and re-upload everything”. No way, Jose.

So, I found another hosting company. This one appears to be sooooooo much nicer than netfirms (except the bandwidth isnt quite as good) but I am really happy with them so far. The gallery script works a lot better (yay for mod-rewrite) and my shopping script works, movable type works – basically everything is falling into place again. All for $9.95/mo. Unlimited domains. Sweet. The hosting company is www.hostgator.com and they are a great company to work with so far.

So, if you tried to get to my sites and they were down, or you were expecting a podcast (or two) thats why things have been delayed. I think I am finally up and running with almost everything now, but there are a lot of sites only half-uploaded that I am slowly working on.

So, netfirms… good riddance!