UK Hosting companies... I'm cursed....

Any regulars will be familiar with some of the issues I've had over the years with different UK hosting companies

Well our US based stuff is still whizzing along issue free, year after year, and it looks like our UK Directory is nice and stable now its settled into it's new home at Rackspace.

The forum waddles along on a mediocre VPS at global gold, but now the latest site to fall over is my blog

mylocalblog.co.uk - Error establishing a database connection dohhhh!

Migrated the blog over to ezpz hosting as we have had another site over there for a while with no issues, and kaboom, they've both been falling over for the last 2 days

Oh well, suppose it is cheap as chips and you get what you pay for. Now looking at RackSpaces cloud hosting, maybe give that a try....

I seem to have a UK hosting midas touch! All I wanted to do was give the blog a makeover..... 2 steps forward, 15 back.....

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cheers Steve
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I have hosted all my sites on USA hosting - Bluehost but recently i have decided to try host some of my local sites on some UK hosting.

I have signed up to HostNine, the reseller account so I can switch between USA servers and UK servers for different type of sites.

I also found webfusion but wasn't sure about them, i went with HostNine instead.

UK hosting sucks compared to USA hosting services

If you would like to borrow my baseball bat, let me know.

I use godaddy hosting for my hobby site, and so far so good. I have the option for ten databases and I have 10 gigs to play with. (Basic plan ~ don't need more yet)
Haven't had a problem yet. I recently stripped the site down to its WP template because I am redesigning, and that didn't end in tears either.

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We're on a UK based hosting service and it occasionally goes down, typically not for long (6 - 15 mins).

In your opinion, how often (per month) does a UK based hosting site have to go down to put it in (a) the better than average category; and (b) the worse than average category?

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Honestly? I would expect 0 minutes of unscheduled outage per month.

There will always have to be maintenance, and that is why hosting companies have maintenance windows, normally during antisocial hours, like 02.00 etc.

A decent hosting company will have a resilient infrastructure, in otherwords if they have a router failure, then traffic should be seamlessly rerouted through a second device. If a hard drive fails on the server where your website lives, it will be part of a hot swoppable pair or set of drives, meaning you won't even notice.

Unfortunately companies cut corners. On shared servers, they either overload them with websites, or resources are incorrectly allocated, so one person runs a ropey script on their database, hogs all the processor, and brings down all the other websites. On dedicated servers, the resiliant infrastructure isn't configured correctly, or they don't have adequate technical staff that can quickly deal with an issue.

If you are paying for a dedicated server, you should have zero unscheduled downtime. If you are on a shared server, it will depend on what you are paying, but personally I don't think you should have any downtime.

Unfortunately, anyone can rent a server, with very low cost software, partition up a server and then market themselves as hosting company. Some are great, a lot are terrible with little to know customer support or technical ability.

Dohh, starting to rant, so I'll shut up. But it is sad that our US servers stay up year after year without so much as a blip.

That said, touch wood, very impressed so far with Rackspace UK

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cheers Steve
Forum Admin - teaboy and general gofer...

Forum Rules and FAQ's at a glance | Find me on Google+ | or even Facebook!

My Local Services - The UK and US Online Business Directory | JobsVitae - Recruitment Help and CV Creation

If you're here to spam, then expect a ban