Forum outage yesterday :(

[sjr4x4]

Apologies for any forum disruption yesterday, our hosting partner Global Gold had another outage From 18.30 till 22.20

The joys of UK Hosting companies....

[CareersPartnershipUK]

Sympathies Steve ....

Dunno how bad your experience is. We've had enough small outages for me to start listing each event in monthly folders (I want to talk more productively about them to our web hoster). Mostly they're small scale (eg around 7 mins) but the odd ones have been much longer.

Would be interested to hear how other micro companies like us get on when using UK hosting companies. We want rock-bottom prices but don't know how much going for cheapness is costing us.

[sjr4x4]

Originally Posted by CareersPartnershipUK

...We want rock-bottom prices but don't know how much going for cheapness is costing us.

Thanks Linda

Hosting is the bain of my life and has been for years. More frustrating because it's an industry I used to work in, so I know how bad it really is!

But your right, people do expect rock bottom prices, and no problems. We have some basic site, hosted on shared servers for about £5 per month. You get what you pay for, if these fall over, oh well. If your site is your life blood, is generating good traffic/conversions, then make sure it's running in the right hosting environment, and spend some money.

You wouldn't expect to see a sales rep zipping up and down the motorway in a Robin Reliant!

For our big sites, we use dedicated managed servers, and you pay for peice of mind and reliability (in theory!) In the UK, we now use Rackspace, very expensive, but superb, so far, 6 months in, very impressed. In the states we have dedicated servers with Softlayer, previously the Planet, with 5 star service.

For the forum, we compromise, its not busy enough to warrant a dedicated server, but too busy for shared storage, so we have gone the VPS (Virtual Private Server) route.

But I've never been a fan of VPS's, and nothing I've witnessed in recent years has convinced me they are any better. So looking at my options, maybe Rackspace cloud hosting, certainly looks interesting.

Would love to set up a hosting company aimed at SME's and do it properly, but unfortunatley there is a sea of cpanel resellers out there, loading 10,000 websites onto a single server

Maybe a future project

[wicketts]

Hi,

If anyone is having problems with their hosting provider, we are more than happy to take over the hosting for you.

In certain cases where uptime is crucial, we are happy to set up a test account for a month for you to test out our hosting and reliability.

I know advertising is banned so please do take this as a offer of help rather than blatant advertising!

Regards


James

[indizine]

Why don't you approach Phil at Openmind Hosting? Phil used to host a forum so knows what resources are required.

Maybe you could negotiate a price deal on a dedicated server, with him getting some free headline forum banner advertising in return or whatever.

[fitz2kleen]

Originally Posted by sjr4x4

You wouldn't expect to see a sales rep zipping up and down the motorway in a Robin Reliant!

I keep telling Marc but will he listen?

[sjr4x4]

Originally Posted by wicketts

Hi,

If anyone is having problems with their hosting provider, we are more than happy to take over the hosting for you.

In certain cases where uptime is crucial, we are happy to set up a test account for a month for you to test out our hosting and reliability.

Hi James, appreciate the offer. I'm afraid I'm a customer you wouldn't want as I've got very high expectations, and get very vocal when it goes wrong (which seems to be quite often!)

Originally Posted by indizine

Maybe you could negotiate a price deal on a dedicated server, with him getting some free headline forum banner advertising in return or whatever.

Interesting idea Sandra, ta

[wicketts]

Originally Posted by sjr4x4

Hi James, appreciate the offer. I'm afraid I'm a customer you wouldn't want as I've got very high expectations, and get very vocal when it goes wrong (which seems to be quite often!)

That sounds like a challenge to me :0) Let me know what you need and what you use in terms of bandwidth, web space etc. and I'll see what we can do for you.

I'd also be happy to discuss a discount for ad space.

Regards


James

[fitz2kleen]

I'd recommend having a chat with James, after almost 4 yrs of trying to sort my website out, James improved it dramatically in 48 hours

I'm very impressed with the Fitz2Kleen - Professional Cleaners in Coventry that he designed for us.

[sjr4x4]

Originally Posted by fitz2kleen

I'm very impressed with the Fitz2Kleen - Professional Cleaners in Coventry that he designed for us.

Happy New year Mark, and like the new site, looks much better, unless Trenas watching, in which case I preferred hers