The quest for new hosts

by Sapphire (October 16, 2007)

It’s been a crazy ten days since I last posted. As soon as I’d get one thing done, ten more things would jump on my to do list, and half of them would be emergencies that needed immediate attention. A lot of what I’ve been up to was switching hosts around.

One of my hosts, Nitrozone, didn’t have AwStats. I had paid for a year up front and it was a shame to cancel early, but when all my sites on their server went down last weekend for quite a few hours, I took it as a sign and got a new reseller account. Then I had room to move this one over, so I canceled the account here.

Another host, Resellerzoom, was dumping gigantic core files into my main folder to the extent that if I didn’t delete them every few hours, it clogged up all my file space. The files were being dumped thanks to an undetected conflict between Wordpress 2.3 and one of Lester Chan’s plugins - I’m not sure which one, but I think it was either WP-Email or WP-Print. Within days, he updated the plugins and all was well. But those few days were hell.

The thing is, there’s a simple way Resellerzoom could configure their servers so it wouldn’t dump those useless core files. But no - they kept insisting they were for debugging (by who? for what purpose? everything was working on the surface, so how could I hope to test and debug?) and volunteered to help me try to debug. But considering Resellerzoom is the host that once installed a 36-hour old backup of my site without warning me, I just decided to move on. I am just not convinced they know how to configure a server any better than I do.

I tried to move my Resellerzoom sites to Axishost.com, who seemed to have a good rep on web hosting forums. But they didn’t respond to any of my inquiries - neither email nor a PM I left Tina at webhostingtalk. Way to lose a potential customer.

If you’re looking for a new host, the host this site was with for a few months did well - that’s Arvixe. I won’t say who I’m currently with because I don’t like the appearance that I’m recommending someone I’ve only been with for a month or a week. I was with Arvixe for about three months, and while I’ve had hosts deteriorate after as much as a year of excellent service (Site5 comes to mind), I can only say I found them to be reliable, fast and good at responding to inquiries.

Posted in Hosting
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