Jan 29 2008
Get a new web host!
I’m not a whiner! But I had a tough week at the end of December. My site was down or so slow it might as well have been down for more than eight days! Multiple daily email messages to and from tech support resulted only in credits to my hosting costs and thanks for ‘being so patient.’ Phone calls resulted in the same. It was determined that my site was on an overloaded server and needed to be moved. Fine, when could that be accomplished I asked. Well, it turned out there were a lot of people who needed to be moved and it might take a month!!!! No kidding!If the site loaded at all, it was taking three or four minutes for it to finally download. Dial-up would be quicker. Other times it was a ‘404 error.’ Once they told me I would have to patient for ‘perhaps a month,’ I obviously began looking for new hosting. It doesn’t matter how pleasant techs are if your site is down.After reading reviews and vendor claims for 24/7 support, I settled on midPhase Hosting. And after the first three weeks I could not be happier. They have exceeded my expectations. My site was up and running within an hour. Of course I couldn’t help but start tweaking to make it better now that everything was back to normal. Whether it was something I did or just a glitch, my permissions became mis-matched and I could not access my site — nor could anyone else. I called tech support and they had it fixed within an hour or so.A few days later I wanted my access panel skin swapped, strictly for ease of use and not any technical differences — really a very low priority — and they did that within an hour. At one point earlier this week, my site was a bit slow. Trust me it was still livable but just not loading quite as quickly as I would like. I asked tech support about it and they moved me to a different server within 24 hours! [Be sure to read the first paragraph of this post about how long that was going to take my previous host when the site was totally down.]I have had four minor ‘tweaking’ tech tickets (wanted my backup to work differently, wanted my cPanel skin changed, etc.) in the last 22 days and the response to every single one of them has been: Things aren’t working the way you want them to? We can fix that for you. They truly understand what customer service means and, more importantly, they follow through. Every time I received a follow-up email message asking me to check things out and make sure they were working the way I expected. The question was how I expected them to work and not the way the techs expected.If you’re looking for a web host I can recommend midPhase Hosting. If you already have a site on another host and want to move, they will transfer everything for you — you don’t have to do anything.I’m hoping that six months or one year from now, I can still report the same satisfaction. They must be able to maintain uptime and handle daily increasing traffic. I know each of us may have negative experiences with computers, peripherals, electronics, appliances, and it doesn’t make my previous hosting company the worst. However, I believe it is important to report the positive.
