Choose Your Web Site Host Carefully

Choose Your Web Site Host Carefully

I have had many hosts for my web sites since the first one I made for our old construction firm in 1995, which I hosted on the now long-defunct Geocities, because it had an ‘easy’ method of building them. We were only there a short while, and I build a ‘real’ web site on the host of our email account host clara.net. That too was given up for reasons of cost, for while web site hosting packages were tumbling due to worldwide competition, Claranet’s hosting charges continued to rise, So, I learned quite a while ago, the necessity to choose your web site host carefully.

Three or four years ago, I had to move again, after three disastrous choices in a row, and finally ended up with the one I am using now, Hostgator. I chose Hostgator after days of painstaking research on Internet user forums like Warriors, where the majority favoured Hostgator, but a lot liked Blue-something or other.

People usually advise you to go with the one they’re with, so opinions are often biased, but I did settle for Hostgator. The cost was right and it had a good reputation. What more can you ask for?

I have had about three years with only one or two annoyances with this web site host, but something has gone drastically wrong with them recently. I suspect that they have expanded too much and are trying to run the enlarged company with the old amount of staff. It’s either that, or a key member of staff in the technical support staff has left, or their machines are too old to cope.

I was alerted two weeks ago by Jetpack – not by Hostgator – that my blog (this one was down). It was up and then down again every hour or so all day. Then HG took it down ‘semi-permanently’ for analysis. Fine, but I had not added any new plug-ins or changed my theme for a year or more. So I waited, and waited and left them notes, and over a week later they told me to fix some database errors.

Now, I have never knowingly set up a database, and although I understand them, I don’t know how to work on them. I left a note saying: ‘I thought that your job was technical support, and my job was paying for it’. It seemed a fair point to me.Yesterday, thirteen days after they took my site down, they pointed to a plug-in that was ‘causing all the trouble’. It redirects visitors to pages the name of which has been changed. I have four such pages on my blog out of hundreds of pages, so I disabled it with one mouse click in two seconds.

So, my obvious point is, why did they have to disable my site for thirteen days? Why did it take them so blumming long?

I suspect staff shortages, but that is not my fault is it? So, the moral is choose your web site host carefully, because they are all good when they are working well, but the test is when things go wrong. I cannot recommend Hostgator any longer, and I will be looking to move my sites as soon as I have time.

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All the best,
Owen

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