Change Servers, or Change Hosts?
Surpass Hosting, the web host I use for this site and most of my others, is beginning to show the same signs of unreliability that I have seen in hosts before I am forced to leave them–primarily, constant site outages, often for several minutes at a time, but increasingly for hours and sometimes even the better part of a day. Twice in the past week, the outages were several hours long, included both of my accounts (which are on separate servers), and even blacked out the host’s own web site.
Maybe it’s just the server (Saprus) that blogd.com is using; my other account with the same host on another server is down far less often. And while Surpass has, every few years, suffered from short bouts of prolonged outages, over the long run they have provided pretty good service for a pretty good price.
Just thinking out loud here. I certainly can’t post this until blogd.com starts responding again. But I gotta figure I am losing significant traffic here over the long run.
I think that what happens with a lot of these hosts is that they price themselves right on the edge of profitability. The problem is that if/when they have ANY problems- and inevitably, they all seem to have some kind of problem- they fall into that negative business cycle where they can’t support their users enough, so the users leave, which lowers revenue, so they can’t support the ones who’re left…
And they certainly can’t raise prices significantly when things aren’t going well.
Personally, I am using a company called BlueHost right now. They’re pretty good and seem to have a decent attitude about how to try and treat customers and run their business. We’ll see if it holds up, of course.
The best approach, I think, it to move to a better host–even if it ends up costing more. I’m not sure how many times I’ve seen complaints about hosting on Blogd, but you write about this a lot more than I would expect. Move to a better host and be happy already! 😉
I could not get into blogd.com last night. I tried several times. I was wondering what was going on. I
We get a pretty good deal and service at www dot xo dot com.
They have something called “Web Site Hosting” with a $11/mth package called “Starter” that provides 5gb download per month, and they do a good job with this. 40gb/month download cost $16/mth. I’m not sure where you sit in their different levels of service.
They are a big company, and can afford to spend 10’s of millions or 100’s of millions of dollars on hardware.
http://www.xo.com/smb/hosting/websites/Pages/standard.aspx