Hosting Woes
June 22nd, 2002[ NOTE: 28 Jan 2003 – I’ve changed my tune about PHPWebhosting. They’ve really turned the corner and provide value for money. This particular rant is a slice in time when things weren’t going so well with them.]
I’m not particularly happy with my hosting provider this week.
Blogchat.com was completely down for 12 hours or so last week. Then it was brought back to a readable state where people could use it again, however 72 hours later, we’ve still yet to get back the ability to access the files in any meaningful way to change them, including updating the blog, shelling in for maintenance, changing any files, you name it.
PHPWebhosting.com provides support only through their control-panel interface. There is no email address, no phone number. We accept this because it is a remarkably inexpensive yet full-featured service.
However, despite repeated service requests with specific instruction to make some sort of acknowledgement to us that they are receiving our requests and doing something about it, we remain with our problem unsolved and with no attempt at contact with us.
We have transferred our beta operations to CubeSoft and I’ve temporarily moved my blog to my ashleyit.com site. Luckily I use ZoneEdit for my DNS needs and redirection was simple so archives are not broken. Had we had our DNS with them, we’d be outta luck for another 48 hours while we changed Internic info.
Tim and I have 3 accounts altogether on PHPWebhosting which we may now have to move elsewhere. Lost revenue for them, hassles for us.
All they had to do was acknowledge our existence and tell us they were working on it. I don’t expect miracles from an inexpensive hosting provider – I understand their razor-thin margins – but I do expect common courtesy.