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| Internet: Web Host Problems |
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| on Wednesday, March 07, 2007 - 02:23 AM - 726 Reads |
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I'm frustrated with my current web host - Hostroute.com Over the past month my site has been inaccessible for about 36 hours, but they are insisting that nothing is wrong. It would be easier if they were just having a bunch of problems that they were working to try to fix. At this point it seems like I have to put up with it or go elsewhere. My questions to them aren't being answered very quickly or helpfully. I guess I'm just one small fish not worth adequately addressing... Hostroute is the fifth web host I've used, and I've been with them for the longest (about three years now). I haven't had any significant problems with them during that time. Some annoyances, certainly. Their tech support is slower to respond than what I've had before, and they often give pithy and rather unhelpful responses, and quickly close my support tickets. Overall, though, I'm not paying much, and am getting a good deal (at least based on what was available 3 years ago).
Just to make sure everything was working well when I wasn't using my own website as much, I signed up for a free monitoring service with hyperspin.com, to ping my server once an hour, just to get an idea of how often it was having problems. Well, it just so happens that I've had a lot of trouble accessing my website during this past month. My parents complain about not being able to send or receive email, and many friends have reported an inability to reach my site. Hyperspin has documented each of these downtimes.
When I bring up the issue with Hostroute, they tell me that there is no problem with their Domain Name servers either and that everything is working fine. Gordon is telling me that if there was a problem, he'd have a whole bunch of complaints. At first he told me it must be my ISP, which didn't make sense when my friends were reporting the problem as well. I checked with Hyperspin and they assured me that they always check sites from multiple locations to make sure it isn't an ISP issue. Then Hyperspin tells me that the error is a result of a DNS problem.
Gordon still insists that there is no problem and to do a tracert to verify things. The tracert gets to the server just fine. His proposed solution is to have me get two accounts and mirror them. Might not be a bad idea anyway, but at this stage, that isn't the point. He essentially wears me out and I stop pressing him. I do wonder, though, if I'd get better support paying twice as much a month...
Then my site goes down again. Another eleven hours on Sunday. I submit another ticket, where Gordon again says it isn't a problem with the server, and that no one else has complained of anything wrong. I then ask 4 specific questions. He posts that there was actually a 3 hour downtime due to someone else's account, and ignores my 4 questions. I tell him that he hasn't answered my questions, and 33 hours (and one reminder) later, he addresses one of the questions. I repeat my remaining 3 questions, and I'm still waiting to hear the response. This is frustrating and ridiculous.
At this point I have to consider moving to another host, in spite of the pain, just on principal. I've had an ok experience with Hostroute, but compared to what I've had before, they are certainly nothing stellar. There are "better" deals out there right now, but it is really hard to judge how support is going to be before signing up. Also, the big thing these days seems to be "unlimited" everything. Now, I'll grant, of the 5 sites I'm hosting, I'm using very little of my overall allotted space, and have very little traffic relatively. A host could have a hundred users like me on one server without any problems. At what point does someone use too much (processor, space, bandwidth), and need to get moved off of the server so the rest of us don't suffer performance issues?
I dread digging out a worksheet, and listing all of the options that are important to me in a host, and digging through all sorts of comparison and review sites, and marketing drivel to find the best deal for the things that I think I'll need in case I might want to use them one day.
Why can't it all just be good? |
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