Rackspace here we come! But apologies for any disruption...

[sjr4x4]

Well after 3 great years hosted by The Planet (now softlayer) we moved My Local Services UK back to UK hosting, only to find nothing had changed, and began experiencing outages again

But never mind, time to move on, and today we are cutting over to Rackspace, and should be live by tonight.

Hopefully disruption should be minimal, but people will be unable to edit listings as from late this afternoon, as we lock the database ready to export to its new home.

So hopefully by tomorrow morning, we shall be whizzing along on Rackspace hardware... outage free and once again reliable!

The Forum will remain with Global Gold (for now...) and My Local Services US will remain with Softlayer, which hopefully will remain as reliable as the Planet was..

[sjr4x4]

Well we migrated My Local Services to Rackspace, and things looking good so far.

Had listing activation email problems on Friday, meaning hotmail users (people still use it?) received blank emails, and Yahoo and a few others had formatting problems. But this turned out to be a code problem with email software which has been fixed.

Touch wood, no other problems reported, but as always shout...

Now looking forward to a few years trouble free hosting with the big boys! Hopefully...

[tomsk]

Steve not sure if you noticed the forum was down this morning - I got the following message.

ERROR

The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.mylocalforums.com/general...e-morning.html

The following error was encountered:

Read Error
The system returned:

** *(104) Connection reset by peer
An error condition occurred while reading data from the network. Please retry your request.

[tomsk]

Got that message for 40 odd minutes

[sjr4x4]

Originally Posted by tomsk

Got that message for 40 odd minutes

Thanks Tomsk

Yup, forum had yet another outage this morning, 1 hour 10 mins

We seem to have found decent partners now on our big sites, so time to investigate again a decent forum hosting partner. Global Gold just doesn't seem to cut the mustard... was promised some service credits from the last outage, which never materialised, and was told by their director to stick by them, as they were getting better

Think I'll have a chat with some of the other biz forum owners, see where they are hosting their vB sites.

You get what you pay for...just seems in the UK you have to pay a bit more...

[highlandspring]

Originally Posted by sjr4x4

Thanks Tomsk

Yup, forum had yet another outage this morning, 1 hour 10 mins

.

Don't forget Google lets you select your location from within Webmaster Tools so I won't worry about US/UK IP's Try instead to find a partner that can keep your site working as you want 24/7.

I moved my servers to the US about 3 years ago when things were tough in 2008 I saved about 50% of the cost - but the benefits are better service, and support - its the quite period in the US when the UK is busiest so often you can get more or less instant support response.

[sjr4x4]

Originally Posted by highlandspring

I moved my servers to the US about 3 years ago when things were tough in 2008 I saved about 50% of the cost - but the benefits are better service, and support

lol it's an age old argument. Did exactly the same, moved from UK Fast to The Planet (based in Texas), and what a difference! Cheaper, faster and more reliable. Spent many threads on multiple forums defending the daft argument that you need to be hosted in the UK, "you will get more traffic... yawn... cobblers...."

As long as you have a country specific TLD, you are fine, or as you say you can also set in WMT.

But this year, with Google putting more emphasis on transaction times, our UK site was starting to lag, so took the painful decision to leave 3 years worth of Rolls Royce style service and uptime, and move our UK sites back to the mothership.

At least it proved the point, hosting in the UK rather than the US, made not a jot of difference to traffic levels, but did increase hosting bills

But support wise, the Rackspace peeps have been on the ball so far, so currently impressed

Plus a big sorry from Global Gold and a sweetener to keep us happy