You may have noticed some down time over the last few days. While I can understand my hosting provider choking on big Digg days, as they did last week with the Ladies of eBay, I will not tolerate downtime on normal traffic days as they’ve done each of the last four days. I haven’t had much time this week to produce unique, quality content while wasting tons of time on the phone (support is overseas, servers are not — makes resolving issues time consuming) and trying to manage the technology behind my blog.
Current status: Hosting co. 1&1 (who I obviously don’t recommend at this point) will not credit me for down time, will not offer an apology, will not admit there’s a problem or correct it, and has stated I must move to a dedicated server @ $150/mo (despite using less than 3% of my traffic allotment) by 12/21 or find “another host provider.” How’s that for customer service?
I’m exploring other providers as well as chatting with a few blog networks about the future of ZNF. If you want to talk, drop me a line: davezatz@yahoo.com
12/3 UPDATE: Thanks for all the suggestions! 1&1 is forcing my hand… My site traffic and revenue do not warrant a dedicated server and 1&1 can’t or won’t reactivate FTP (spent over an hour on the phone Friday night, still not working on Sunday). This made it tricky to move my stuff but reinforced the point that I need a new home.
For the moment I have migrated everything to both BlueHost and Media Temple and we’ll see how things shake out over the next few weeks. So far we’re not off to a good start — both hosts had downtime yesterday (server on BlueHost went down, MySQL database on Media Temple went down several times). Despite TechCrunch’s effusive praise (without trying the service), MT has been experiencing growing pains (outages) with their new “Grid Server” solution. In theory, their server clusters should provide fault tolerance when hardware/software failures strike as well as overcome traffic spikes (which is why you’re reading this post from El Segundo). But should they fail to deliver, BlueHost is standing by.
All told, I’ve spent over 25 hours on this and I don’t think we’re done yet… Maybe it’s time for a new hobby.
It seems some websites that I’ve visited that have had hosting issues have gone to Laughing Squid.
http://laughingsquid.net/
I don’t know much about them, but it might be something for you to look into as well.
Dave-
Are you looking for someone to be your sysadmin or do you want your own dedicated box to run yourself? If the later, visit http://ev1servers.net/. I’ve found them to be extremely good and helpful. If you need a sysadmin for a dedicated box, poke around there forums for some of the regulars that will do it for you.
Keep up the good work!
Steve
Steve: I manage servers all day at work. The blog is supposed to be a fun hobby, so I’d rather others handle it. :)
Dave,
I wish you the best of luck with Bluehost. I’ve had a lot of success with them as my hosting provider.