Transition
Techy-geeky admin stuff here, move along if you don’t care about such stuff…
My blog may have had an outage earlier today, depending on where you are dialing in from. The Domain Name Server is in transition, and while at work I have been getting the new site, at home I am getting the old site, which means that the transition of the domain name is incomplete. This is because not all ISPs update their domain name “phone book” at the same time, so some people looking for blogd.com will see this site, and some will see the old site–until all the DNS entries have been updated and everyone gets pointed here.
The outage would have been detected by those who saw the new site–which unfortunately did not latch on to the domain name fast enough, and was a dead link for perhaps several hours. Under my past web hosts, that kind of thing could potentially last for days, and if I wanted fast service I’d have to holler like the sky was falling–and I forgot that I was dealing with new people. So I hollered at the Surpass tech support people, who, within a half hour, had it all fixed. Those guys are good.
When everyone gets set up to look at the new site, I’ll start getting back to publishing photo stories. I have been avoiding them for about a month because of my bandwidth crisis–just a half dozen pictures every week would have sent me sailing past my bandwidth ceiling. But with 75 GB, 15x my previous limit, that should be no problem–heck, I might have to see if I can host some video or something!
Once Blogd gets settled down and humming along, I’ll be moving The Expat onto this account as an add-on domain, cutting the costs even more. It’ll muck up the stats a tad, but I figure I can live with that, at the tune of $50 a year less.
Luis,
After reading your comments about Surpass, they sounded good. You made the transition OK, and other people generally like them, so…
I tried http://www.surpasshosting.com/ and all I get is a “Server not found” error. Wading throught the first page or so of Google gave no other address, so I wonder where they are. Are you still happy with them? And if so, can I reach them under a different name?
Cheers! And, keep cool!
Ted:
The URL you quoted works fine, at least now. A few weeks ago, Surpass had a meltdown for a while, but from what people were saying it was the first in a very long time. The host explained the problems in detail afterwards, and how they struggled to correct them. When did you try to access their main page? As far as I am aware, Surpass has been up and running for the past few weeks, since the meltdown.
This kind of thing has happened with every host I have used before. For example, Aletia had tons of problems and I was going to leave them–but the they offered to comp my account (free, indefinitely) and I stayed on, and they’ve been excellent for more than two years now.
I tried Myacen for a while, and while they were mostly reliable, they also had meltdowns, as well as server transfers without notice, and a bunch of other snafus. But theirs were more of a standard thing, lots of little stuff over a longer time–that’s the sign of a bad host. One major problem scares customers away, but is inevitable with just about any host and usually results with better service afterwards.
As I’ve said in other places, I’m giving Surpass a chance, despite a major meltdown just a few weeks after I signed up. After I’ve been with them for 3-6 months, I’ll be able to judge better. But already I find them better than Myacen, if only in their response time to help desk queries–they usually reply within minutes, not hours or days like Myacen and many other hosts. They still have excellent disk space/bandwidth, a plethora of features, and most services turned on–for example, you can recharge your stats any time you want, instead of having to wait for the host do do it for you.
Also, they offer a 90-day money-back guarantee, which many would feel is a safe back-up (though like with many businesses, they are the “sole arbiter” of whether your reason to ask for your money back is valid).
In short, they still seem like a good host, but they are on probation for a while, with me. I will probably start monitoring downtime with them very soon, to see how their claims hold up.
Luis