mattadams
08-09-2006, 12:29 PM
Here's the story to the outages... a few times in the past few months my old ISP (penguinhost.net, feel free to trash them around the net as much as possible) has "suspended" my account, freezing my e-mails, all web access, etc. because they claim I am spamming people. One time, the server was legitimately hacked into and was being used as a mail server to send fraduulent emails. I explained it wasn't me, even submitted stuff to them prooving it wasn't me, etc. but I did occasionally send out volunteer newsletters which would be about 800 emails in a few hours (I tried to set it up that way to not bog down the servers too much, plus they had a 400 email per hour limit), well yesterday they claimed I was using too much of the CPU (a claim which was not true or if it was, was no result of my actions, I was doing nothing differently) and said they were cancelling the account. I told them thats bullcrap, this and that, they said they'd look into it some more but didn't take the account off suspend. I told them I need this up, this is not just a website with some pictures on it, people actually use it,e tc. so they agreed to bring it up for 24 hours to allow me to backup my data and move to another host, which I did.
Last night, I signed up with godaddy.com for hosting services and spent about 4-5 hours learning their program, starting restoring databases etc. to that location but quickly determined that site was not going to be able to meet the needs of the website. I spent another 2-3 hours this morning working with their support to see if there was a way to make it do what I wanted it to do but determined many of their limitations just wouldn't work (for example, all email addresses were restricted to 10mb, etc.). I cancelled that account and signed up with yet another host, and they were able to help get everything restored with minimal time, minimal impact on me, and without loosing peoples e-mails, etc. So as of right now, we are hosted with hostgator.com. There are many advantages to hostgator.com, the first seems to be that everything seems a lot faster, I hope its not just my imagination. They have a 99.9% uptime guarantee and if you find that it is not honored, rather than pro-rate it, they credit the entire month. I'm also allowed more hard drive space, more bandwidth, and more domains.
Unfortunately, since penguinhost.net claimed I violated the terms of service of the agreement, they cancelled and are refusing to refund the difference. Since I just renewed a few months ago for about $100, this pisses me off as you can understand. This new service is more expensive than the old host, but hopefully of higher quality. Let me know what you think. If you happen to have a spare couple of bucks, we can use it! :)
Keep in mind, that any posts since last evening have been removed. Thats not because I dislike you, but thats when I did hte backup of the databases that I restored this morning.
Last night, I signed up with godaddy.com for hosting services and spent about 4-5 hours learning their program, starting restoring databases etc. to that location but quickly determined that site was not going to be able to meet the needs of the website. I spent another 2-3 hours this morning working with their support to see if there was a way to make it do what I wanted it to do but determined many of their limitations just wouldn't work (for example, all email addresses were restricted to 10mb, etc.). I cancelled that account and signed up with yet another host, and they were able to help get everything restored with minimal time, minimal impact on me, and without loosing peoples e-mails, etc. So as of right now, we are hosted with hostgator.com. There are many advantages to hostgator.com, the first seems to be that everything seems a lot faster, I hope its not just my imagination. They have a 99.9% uptime guarantee and if you find that it is not honored, rather than pro-rate it, they credit the entire month. I'm also allowed more hard drive space, more bandwidth, and more domains.
Unfortunately, since penguinhost.net claimed I violated the terms of service of the agreement, they cancelled and are refusing to refund the difference. Since I just renewed a few months ago for about $100, this pisses me off as you can understand. This new service is more expensive than the old host, but hopefully of higher quality. Let me know what you think. If you happen to have a spare couple of bucks, we can use it! :)
Keep in mind, that any posts since last evening have been removed. Thats not because I dislike you, but thats when I did hte backup of the databases that I restored this morning.