Comments
After enduring far too many site outages, I have decided to switch site hosts. The move will happen shortly and should have minimal impact on you. If anything, it will just look like my host is down yet again. However, comments posted during the few minutes when the switchover is taking place might be lost.
Update: It’s on the new server. Hopefully, there won’t be any glitches. If you notice any, please note them in the comments below.
Categories
Tags
He moved over to my hosting, http://www.alahosting.com.
PoliBlogger is also hosting under there. Hosting Matters just gave him way too many problems too host there.
If you are interested in hosting their, just send me an e-mail, jeff@alahosting.com.
James. I believe you were with Hosting Matters, right? I am considering a move as well. I think Hosting Matters is a good company. They respond well to any questions or concerns. Unfortunately, they are also a very popular hosting service with larger blogs. That makes them a target of DOS attacks.
Let me know how your new host works out. If it goes well, I may transfer there as well. After all, I am too lazy to look around myself.
Michael:
Agreed all around. HM offers excellent customer service, especially at the price.
As Jeff Vreeland notes, though, hosts should be able to shut off DOS attacks pretty easily, let alone when they’re repeated victims. Plus, Jeff fixed a problem with one of my spam filters that was likely contributing to some of the site woes but that HostingMatters simply wouldn’t have had the time or inclination to trouble shoot.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Like I would use any asshat host who slams another host for giving someone “too many problems” like this Vreeland dude does, who has, at alahosting.com, zero content, no pricing, no support links, no offnetwork support links, no ticketing system, no helpdesk, no nothing? You have to be kidding me. Which server did you get from HFW, Jeff, the baby celery? Somehow I doubt you have 24/7 support available, so just what happens to your one man band when someone needs support after you hit the pillow, or when some spammer hits these blogs on your little baby server? Plus, anyone who claims that hosts should be able to “shut off DOS attacks pretty easily” doesn’t now jack all about the nature of DOS attacks and couldn’t possibly know what went on behind the scenes at HM (and two of my sites were affected by that DOS, one of which was moved, by HM, with no action by me, to another network while they worked through who the target was). Bet you didn’t bother to ask them what steps they were taking to put DOS mitigation in place, either. That would have involved way more effort than actually moving away from a host whose praises you’ve sung in this very blog, despite what Jeff has to say.
The fact that ol’ Jeff can’t seem to spell correctly is just another bonus, I guess (“too host”? “hosting their”? Failed that class, did you?). Bad, bad choice, James. You should have done more homework, because between you and Jeff, you don’t seem to know what has to happen behind the scenes to make things work or fix things when they go wrong. I know a lot of it, and I know when people are ungrateful boneheads.
BTW, James, you claim that HM “simply wouldn’t have the time or inclination” to look into whatever problem it is you were having. Did you bother to contact them? I’ve contacted them with trivial stuff and horribly complicated stuff, and you know how many times they pushed me aside? Zero. I’m calling bs on that particular claim, and I’m betting you didn’t even take the time to shoot them a ticket.
I’m staying with HM. Jeff-boy ain’t worth it at all, based on just this little interaction. Plus, your site is slower now than it was on the HM server you used to be on. HM rocks harder than any other host I’ve ever used, their communication is better than anyone else’s, and there’s no way a few issues here and there would change that for someone actually concerned about their site and being able to contact their host 24/7 about anything under the sun.
Hilarious.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=418532
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=406880
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=213183
Good luck. You’re going to need it if you believe that any host is completely without problems. Oh, including DOS attacks.
BTW, Jeff, found a job yet?
Personally, I also host a site with Hosting Matters. Best host I’ve ever had, never afraid to explain anything, even when there’s a problem or whether the issue is something small or big or something stupid I’ve done, most comprehensive help section and support I’ve ever experienced. They’ve been around since 2000, which gives them a lot more experience than Jeff, whose domain was just registered in July of this year. One of the parts I find most amusing, James, is not just your “it will just look like my host is down yet again”, which is completely off base, since overall your site hasn’t been down any more often than any other site out there since I’ve been visiting it, but also Jeff’s conceit of using a UPS Store as his administrative email address in his WHOIS – calling it a “suite”, as if it’s some office – as well as his inability to spell his own address in that same WHOIS. Never saw a “Trailor” park myself. It’s all very droll for someone who lists their registrant email at a .edu.
I’d also be inclined to ask Jeff if “Webspires Technologies” is a properly registered company in some state. Just to make sure everything is legal, that the business pays its taxes, etc. Just some of the many things one should consider when selecting a company that is going to provide service for something you deem important, don’t you know.
Like Cranium, I’ll wish you luck, because you’re going to desperately need it. Sorry, Jeff, but casting aspersions on another host wen you have no clue about their service makes you look like a choad, and therefore someone to be avoided. I’ll stick to the host I know can provide the services they say they do, complete with proper spelling and various free upgrades over the years, and the one that has provided me with exceptional service since late 2000 after I went through half a dozen other hosts.
Personally, I also host a site with Hosting Matters. Best host I’ve ever had, never afraid to explain anything to me, even when there’s a problem or whether my issue is something small or big or something stupid I’ve done, most comprehensive help section and support I’ve ever experienced. They’ve been around since 2000, which gives them a lot more experience than Jeff, whose domain was just registered in July of this year, and Annette is scarily intelligent about all kinds of things, both technical and non.
One of the parts I find most amusing, James, is not just your “it will just look like my host is down yet again”, which is completely off base, since overall your site hasn’t been down any more often than any other site out there since I’ve been visiting it, but also Jeff’s conceit of using a UPS Store as his administrative email address in his WHOIS – calling it a “suite”, as if it’s some office – as well as his inability to spell his own address in that same WHOIS. Never saw a “Trailor” park myself. It’s all very droll for someone who lists their registrant email at a .edu.
I’d also be inclined to ask Jeff if “Webspires Technologies” is a properly registered company in some state. Just to make sure everything is legal, that the business pays its taxes, etc. Just some of the many things one should consider when selecting a company that is going to provide service for something you deem important, don’t you know.
Like Cranium, I’ll wish you luck, because you’re going to desperately need it. Sorry, Jeff, but casting aspersions on another host when you have no clue about their service makes you look like a choad, and therefore someone to be avoided. I’ll stick to the host I know can provide the services they say they do, complete with proper spelling and various free upgrades over the years, the one that answers any question I might send in, and the one that has provided me with exceptional service since late 2000 after I went through half a dozen other hosts.
It’s worse than you think, Secessional: the address Jeff
uses in his WHOIS is not only misspelled, but doesn’t
even seem to exist. At least Mapquest can’t find “23 Dozier Trailor Park”.
On the map, it looks more like it’s in the middle of two railroad
spurs.
As far as the debate, I’m a happy Hosting Matters customer for my business site, and will be for as long as they’re around. Far too many outages my rear end. I was on the same server as you, James. When there was a high load problem, and an issue with mySQL, I dropped a note to HM, whoc told me one account was creating some problems lately with their mySQl usage, but they hadn’t tracked it down just yet and had sent a note to the user asking what, if anything, had changed on the site.
When I asked HM about the issues on the server, they said they were receiving a new server (today) with even higher specs to move an account off that server. My bet is it would have been you if, like someone said above, you’d actually just contacted them. So personally, go right ahead with some untested guy who appears to have false information in his domain registration, has a business – for lack of a better word – that has only been around for two months, has no business filing I can find in his own state or others commonly used for that sort of thing, and has nothing at all on his site. Should be a hoot. Can’t wait for you to bitch about him when the first problem crops up. Might be when a spammer comes through your blog with trackback referral spam, creating mysql usage through the roof. Might be at 0430 when he’s sleeping and you have to wait hours for a response to something. Might be if his upstream, or one of his own clients, receives their very own DOS attack, as Cranium dug up at that forum above.
My sensible brain and my dollars know where the quality is. From what I’ve seen so far, it’s definitely not with the guy pimping himself in your comments and pimping you on his no-content page. I hope you gave him permission to use your site as an example. If not, then that’s just another difference between a two-bit host and a host like HM: they’d never violate their clients’ privacy in that way. Besides all that, Jeff hasn’t exactly comported himself well in your comments here, and it’s not confidence-inspiring at all.
Steven,
It’s quite a bit of unnecessary invective, actually. However, I agree that there are a lot of questions that these people raise that Jeff should answer. I would like to know something of what he has to offer, whether he has a legitimate business, and whether or not he can support me before I switch.
As it stands, I see nothing when I go to his site, except that he hosts five blogs.
Jeff’s Alahosts is a spinoff/subsidiary of a larger company he’s been running for four years. I talked through all those issues on the telephone with him and worked through a duplicate version of OTB on his server before agreeing to the move.
And, yes, I put in more tickets with HostingMatters on these repeated issues than I can count. They’re extremely helpful, especially given the low price and the size of the company. But the bottom line was that my site has gone down dozens of times in the last 18 months, often for hours at a time, and usually during high traffic spike periods and finally got frustrated enough to try another route.
Most of the problems were outside HM’s control and I’m not blaming them for those. At the same time, I don’t want to suffer for them.
Also, some of the problems on my server were, I was told, caused by OTB itself running an inordinate number of processes but we were never able to pin the cause down and create a permanent fix. They moved me to a new server at least one time before and had promised to do so again. That might have fixed the problems; it might not. But the site has been down repeatedly the last week and I had an attractive offer to move. I figured it was worth a shot.
“Dozens of times” for “hours at a time”? Still calling bs on this, James, because they’ve only had a few major issues that resulted in problems of such scope. If your OWN site is going down, then it probably is something on your OWN site creating the problem in the first place. Love to see just how Jeff will solve it while he’s sleeping in the wee hours when you really need him.
Steven, nobody said anything about illegal business practices. It’s clear, though, that there are questions about this “company”, because right now, it looks like any 12 year old with a reseller account and no legitimate business record. Jeff did more than give his web address: he slammed another (excellent) host with no knowledge whatsoever about what any problems may have existed or the causes of those problems. That makes him even more like those 12 year olds.
And this isn’t unnecessary invective, James. Both you and your new “host” – who is not, by any stretch, running something that’s an offshoot of a larger company that he was running for four years, and anyone with half a brain could look at him begging for a job at webhostingtalk as recently as August to see he used to work for the place where his server now sits, and that place and his new venture have nothing to do with one another – have slung arrows at an excellent company for no reason other than what seem to be your new host’s trolling for business even though he has nothing on his site and apparently isn’t even registered as a legitimate business, and your own issues with just sending HM a ticket on something or other, like this spam thing you think they would be too busy to answer for you, even though you readily admit they’ve never ignored or been too busy to answer anything else you send. It’s ridiculous.
Hey, McGehee – just where do you get the idea that OTB has EVER been the target of a DOS attack? That’s absurd and not supported by one shred of evidence. He’s not exactly Instapundit and never will be, who I don’t think has ever been a target, or LGF, who I know was a target – and who, by the way, HM still hosts, outside their main network. So don’t be an idiot. And if you think ol’ Jeff has the wherewithal to personally stop a DOS attack, better think again, since he doesn’t own anything: even the company he used to work for, where he has his little server (and just what are the specs on that server, I wonder) has suffered DOS attacks resulting in hours of downtime. Those people who think DOS attacks can be stopped in a matter of minutes are fools, plain and simple, and clearly understand nothing about the technical issues that go hand in hand with such attacks.
Does Jeff own his own equipment? Nope. Can he touch it if something goes wrong? Nope, it doesn’t belong to him, and even if it did, he’d have to drive from AL to IL to get to it. If something serious goes wrong, guess what: first you have to get hold of him. Good luck after hours. Then he has to get hold of his provider. Then it has to come back down the chain. In the meantime, if the server is down, just how will you contact him? No offnetwork site, you know.
I don’t care if OTB moves to Mars. I do care that these potshots are being taken at a company that does a hell of a lot for its clients behind the scenes to take care of things before they’re even noticed and is constantly improving their offerings, with little or no thanks from certain types of people. I do care that ol’ Jeff thinks there are so many problems at a host that’s probably about 1000 times his size, and with which he has no experience, and yet feels compelled to act like a choad (as Secessional so appropriately called it) by making such defamatory claims in these comments. And mostly, I do care that you, James, seem compelled to slam HM at just about every opportunity you get for any minor hiccup that affects your site when even you admit that sometimes, it’s your OWN site creating that hiccup and you haven’t the technical knowledge to fix it, and at other times you’re calling them the greatest thing since sliced bread. The latter, they are, in my opinion, and I don’t really take that hard of an opinion on most companies. I do for HM, because they obviously care about their clients, to the point where they will move sites **cough::OTB::cough** to newer servers because of the site’s or server’s need for it. They don’t deserve Jeff’s childish potshots about things he has no clue about nor your snide remarks about any interruption just looking like your host is down again (since you can’t seem to tell the difference between your host and your site, which obviously created its own issues). Yes, your post pissed me off. Why you thought it was necessary is beyond me.
But you can bet I’ll be watching your site, James. It’s slower now than it was before, and when it goes down, I hope you slam Jeff just like you did HM, given all the things you readily tell people they’ve done for you over time. You might ask ol’ Jeff what his bandwidth overage charges are too. I sincerely doubt HM was actually charging you for everything you used. That’s the benefit, you see, of a company who actually owns their own equipment and buys bandwidth in huge amounts from their provider versus someone leasing a server from another company who will keep close tabs on that usage.
I’ll reiterate, for myself and for anyone else who runs across this tripe: ask yourself who you would trust more. Some random guy who seems to have one server he can’t even touch if there’s something like a hardware issue, whose little “company” has only been around since July 2005 and doesn’t appear to be registered anywhere, who has nothing of substance on his site, who is obviously a one man operation, and who does not present himself civilly in public? Or a company that has a proven track record for over five years, has many thousands of satisfied customers who aren’t afraid of opening tickets they know will get answered because they do in fact have both the time and inclination to answer them, despite what James opines because he didn’t bother, with 24/7 support and a full staff, full help files, offnetwork emergency sites, complete communication with their clients, and someone in charge who actually knows their technical stuff, inside and out?
Easy choice for the rest of us. Others have to learn the hard way. I know someone who left HM because they thought, for some reason, the prices were too high. They came back in two months after a disastrous experience with someone pretty much like ol’ Jeff here. For me, Seccesional, and Mack, plus however other many, many thousands there are, there is no other place that will treat you as well as Hosting Matters.
End of my rant.
