A Hosting Nightmare
December 18th, 2006Where do I begin? I guess it all started in a project meeting for our marketing class. Paul mentioned he got a great deal with Dreamhost.com. I could go on with all the great features, but what sold me was my friend and colleague had faith in Dreamhost. Nothing could go wrong right?
… Since most the students at Seneca had Dreamhost we all started to share our problems. Some of the stories:
- My mx records for my email were somehow corrupted when I added a subdomain.
- It only took 12 hours to get a response and fix.
- Then we noticed our pages would take 10-15 seconds to load??
- Paul’s wiki page would timeout/crash .. several times?
It was apparent these problems weren’t going away, so I started to look elsewhere. Skynethosting.net!!! Sounds like the robotics/engineering company from The Terminator 2 - Judgment day!!! Maybe that should of been a hint to me. Anyways, they have a free 30 day trial without any prepayment, so I got an account. I must say it was better than Dreamhost in terms of performance, but lacked the overselling features from Dreamhost. At this point I tried avoiding overselling plans. I just want some reliable, and Skynethosting seemed to be the one. I ended up canceling the account because Dreamhost seemed to become more stable after our complaints.
After another week or two the problems at Dreamhost kept on coming. It became obvious when Tom was presenting his marketing final project to the class, and his website seemed to take a nap. It wasn’t hard to figure out he was also with Dreamhost.
I took it upon my self to find another hosting. During my web host hunting I found Skynethosting again, but this time they offered free JSP service. Wow, how could I lose?? It seems Skynethosting’s JSP servers were full, but they managed to squeeze me in there. After canceling my account with Dreamhost, I started to move my resources over to Skynethosting. I must of taken too much over from Dreamhost. Using only 3/1000 megs I noticed the server would go online and offline every now and then. It seems the server’s partition was 100% full. After complaining a bit and getting nowhere after 24 hours, I happened to find ImHosted.com.
…So far, ImHosted.com has been great. Its fast, reliable, and has JSP support. A little more expensive than the others, but for $15/month it seems worth it. If everything in the next few days/weeks goes well I’m moving again. Hopefully for good. They seem very restrictive so far, but I’m hoping thats not a bad thing. I had to give them photo ID and a reason why I need SSH. As long they aren’t paranoid with their hosting that I can’t even get SSH access, I think this is my new home.
What I learned from this experience. My sister put it best …”Finding a good hosting is like finding a good man”. We are a rare breed.
Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end. ImHosted.com turned out to be paranoid. I got the SSH access, but restricted to one IP. Okay not a big deal, I can live with it. When I wanted a second account to host my other domain they said it was impossible. Odd how skynethosting can do it. Anyways, I just got sick of all the restrictions of ImHosted.com. I want to manage multiple hostings with multiple accounts. I want SSH access anywhere. They’re services are great for businesses, but I am a developer and I want full control.
So, I’m sticking with skynet. They moved my accounts around, so this website is not on the server with a full hard drive. My other account is still on the JSP server, because I’ve noticed the stability has improved. Other than that bad experience a few weeks ago, skynet is probably the best for the price they offer.
Still shopping for a web hosting provider makes you consider just hosting yourself. Maybe it will come down it that one day… lol.