Site5 drops the ball
by Sapphire (February 4, 2007)
I’ve hosted several sites on a Site5 package for well over a year. The package I originally got was pretty reasonable for the money. The next year, I got a much better deal - all sorts of unlimited stuff! - for less money. I knew that wasn’t a good sign.
During all this time, there were a lot of months they fell short of their 99.9% uptime guarantee. But only by a percent or two, and it was better than other hosts I’d had, so I was content to leave the sites there for the time being. On a lot of mornings, the site would load very slowly or not at all for 30 minutes or an hour. Still, it was acceptable for those sites at that time.
This weekend, something unacceptable for any site happened. My sites went down for 36 hours as Site5 replaced bad disks on the server, then restored everything while making upgrades. There was no discussion of maybe moving the sites to another server or something during this time so they could stay up. My guess is that Site5 has its servers crammed to the limit already.
In any case, I’m now looking at Pair and Fluidhosting, both of which appear to have true 99.98+% uptime. If you have any other suggestions, let me know. But one of the sites in question is Project B-2 Bomber, which is now getting in excess of 10k visitors per month, and it’s an active community. I don’t want downtime throwing it off like that again.
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February 5th, 2007 at 2:20 am
Let me know who you choose. Have had loads of downtime on fates over the last year and am having a hard time getting my affiliate payments out of them even though they are many months overdue. To top it off, the accused me of trying to increase my post count on their forum while asking for them to make the payout after many tickets that have not been replied to and a number of promises to pay out.
Totally unacceptable, and I couldn’t care less about their forums or post count, I only go there when something is wrong, is it my fault that it is often?
Additionally, they MOVED my post into a brand new forum and set it as private so it is hidden out the way of anyone else. Damage control or hiding the truth? You decide. Grrrrr
David
February 5th, 2007 at 9:30 am
I’m always glad to hear who ends up having good up time. I was really underwhelmed with Hosting Revolution and am no longer there. While cubic’s up time is good, the down time always seems to come in about 12 hour lots during Oct and Nov–the main aff sell time. Don’t know if they have a lot of aff people there and so they are using more bandwidth or what but it happened two years in a row. I’m not using them any more. I went with an expensive host and am doing some addon domains. I’ll see if that affects my stats at all.
February 5th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Just wanted to pop in to say sorry to hear about your issues. I understand your concerns, and they are issues we will be dealing with internally.
The server restore that occurred over the weekend made painfully clear a specific weakness in our restore process (related to accounts that had hundreds of thousands of files in single directories) that we will be working to correct. It wasn’t something we had run into with previous server restores, and is something we’ll be working to correct in the future.
If you want to speak with me personally about your issues this weekend, feel free to contact me at the e-mail address associated with this comment (I’d be happy to provide any additional specifics I have regarding the issues this weekend, or assist you in working out a service credit).
Either way, I wish you the best of luck with your web properties and sites in the future (sounds like some of them are really taking off)
February 5th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Dave, there certainly do seem to be more poor hosts out there than good ones. It’s frustrating! I’ll definitely post when I’ve chosen someone, and in a few months report on how it’s going.
Bonnie, good for you! I’ve had sites with Hosting Revolution before - they were good, but there was sometimes significant downtime. I’ve never noticed the trouble you describe with Cubic, but then I never hosted very important sites there. Actually, I am now hosting some important sites with them, but on a reseller account. Most hosts do better for their resellers than for their shared hosting customers.
February 5th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
Adam, I appreciate that you took the time to respond personally. A downtime credit would be pointless at this juncture, since it wouldn’t be refunded as part of my overall refund when I cancel the remaining pre-paid months. In fact, the credit I had before my last payment was not applied to that payment, which I intend to bring up with billing when I ask for my refund.
I may get in touch with you later, once I’ve decided for sure what I’ll be doing with my sites.
February 8th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
[...] it was time to get serious about putting 3 posts a day on each of my blogs? Well, that was before Site5 went down for 36 hours, taking my sites with them. That prompted a major new host shopping expedition, complete with [...]