Learning About Web Hosts The Hard Way!
May 26th, 2007 by jean
Is it true that making mistakes is the best way to learn? Definitely! No question about it. However, making a mistake when choosing your web host can be particularly painful, as we found out recently.
We had been with our web host for a couple of years, and always received good technical support with hardly any downtime. Based on that, we had recently upgraded to a VPS account, which combined all our sites and gave us greater control and flexibility managing the sites.
Imagine our horror when without warning, all email from our various domains suddenly went off the air – missing in action. Shortly afterwards our main website also went down.
No amount of phoning, email requests or live chat calls resulted in any response – it’s a helpless and frustrating feeling to say the least. We had a contact in the sales department, who was also unable to get anyone technical to respond to us. (More on this when we finally move all our sites)
After a couple of days we started looking for another host, and decided to check out wwKiosk.com who were highly recommended by Mike Filsaime in his famous Resource Report. It didn’t take us long to realise that they offered certain services which put them a cut above the rest in the world of web hosting.
So, after two or three days of very hard work – setting up hosting and email accounts, uploading websites and re-testing everything, we were finally back on the air.
And finally, ELEVEN days later, we received an email response from our previous webhost, who noticed that our nameservers were no longer pointing to them. (Funny about that!)
Our disastrous experience has led us to several questions we should have asked ourselves when choosing a web host:
- Is there personal information available about the the owners and the staff?
- Does the company own and operate it’s own datacentres? (Many just rent the space, if one company’s servers go down, they all go down)
- Does the company own it’s own fibre optic lines? (Many share lines with other web host companies)
- How long have the staff worked for the company?
- Is there a variety of 24/7 support options? (Phone, email, live chat, live conference calls, support desk)
Some of this information may be difficult to determine. Usually if it is not mentioned on the website a company does not want you to know about it!
Suffice to say we have learned our lesson the hard way, and hope our experience will help you to avoid any web hosting disasters in the future.
Stay tuned for more on the previous web host, we’ll post a full story soon.
Cheers
Jean
