When Hosting Makes You Stressed!
Sep 6th, 2008 by zania
If anyone is wondering why I have not posted here since 15th August, when I wrote about Cynicism and Depression, it is partly because I have been busy doing all my other work online, but mainly because the account providers where Fraying Edges is hosted decided to mess about with my hosting, grrr!!!
In fact, I did make another post after that one, on Night Terrors, but that disappeared never to be seen again… It was a long post too, and informative. More grrr’s!!!
I have several different hosting accounts, but the one I use for this particular blog appeared to be the best - fast, easy to work and with extremely good support. Nothing has changed here… apart from the fact that once you start getting a ton of visitors to your blog, the hosting account in question decides to take the blog (and all other blogs on the hosting account, plus email services and any other tools you have hosted there) ‘off air’ for several hours a day and at odd times.
Hence hosting stress!
For the last couple of weeks, I have been searching diligently for new website hosts. Ones who are reasonably priced, good on support, provide automatic install for wordpress, drupal and all the other stuff I use (installs and updates of tons of blogs and sites is not good news when you have to do it all manually)… and who will not throw up their hands in horror when you actually get a nice number of visitors en masse.
So far I have hit a brick wall. And I must say ‘buyer beware’ when you look at hosting packages.
Now, for most of my blogs, I am quite happy with Hostgator. And Servage is great too for having a European Hosting Account. Both provide tons of hosting space, use of numerous domain names, email accounts, instant install of Wordpress, etc, etc, and are great with average size blogs with an average number of visitors. Along with the other hosts I use (who I cannot recommend quite as highly…), they do the job efficiently and with great support. For someone starting to build a blog (or a number of blogs), then these guys are definitely the way to go.
But once you get a blog like Fraying Edges Depression Help, which gets loads of visitors to certain posts, en masse from Stumbleupon, etc (and you are all very welcome, by the way 
), you need a host which provides more Resources. You can upgrade your account at your cheap shared hosting accounts (which I had in place already), but at the end of the day, shared hosting will still leave you offline, or receiving ‘warning emails’ (followed by your account being very closely monitored for every little ‘bump’), or simply losing your websites altogether, if you get a persistently large number of visitors.
So I have been searching for a hosting solution. But I have yet to find one…
Well, that’s not completely true…. I have found a couple of VPS (Virtual Private Server - or VDS [virtual dedicated server]) hosts I am using and monitoring for some of my new blogs and new tools I use to post to them. But I will not recommend them here until I know for sure they do all they say they are going to do (99.998% uptime, great customer support etc, etc,…). We will see…
Why not buy dedicated hosting? Because I am not very ‘tech aware’ and the thought of being ‘all alone’ on a dedicated server is scary 
, but I’m working on that one, slowly…
But at this point in time Fraying Edges is still on that original shared hosting account and spending its time on and off air as the host feels fit. Moving it to another host will take more stress and I am not ready to deal with that yet!
So, if you arrived here and found this blog offline (and then came back again to find it online, otherwise you would not be reading this, ), that’s the reason why.
And if anyone out there can give me a link to a reliable web host who allows for large hitting blogs, who provides great support, instant installs, etc, and who would be willing to help me move Fraying Edges to their server, then please let me know (either here, or by emailing me at zanianow (at) frayingedges (dot) com). I do not promise to use them (depends on relative price and what they allow me to install), but I will be happy to check them out.
End of stress-filled post!
Zania, my dear, I had just popped on to write you an email to find out how you are and why I hadn’t seen any updates from you, but decided first to fetch feeds from your site on the off-chance I was missing something. To my pleasant surprise there is this post. Not to minimalize your stress, however, I understand that it’s only your duress over hosting that is the source of my pleasure. I too have been the victim of insane and mentally distorted hosting providers. Have you checked out http://dreamhost.com/ ? It was recommended to me a while back when I searching for a good and reliable host. A lot of people around here like them, and was recommended to me by a tech/geek. If I was going to get hosting again, I’d definitely try them first. I never used them so I can’t give you a first-hand account. Please let me know how you fare. Email me directly if you’d like to keep in touch easier. I’m usually checking your site for new content via RSS though, so I should be able to keep apprised of what’s going on either way. Take care….
Hi Andy,
Wow, that was a quick response, thanks!
Hmmm, Dreamhost… I’ve heard good and bad things about them. Some swear that they are great, others (some of whom I work with) say definitely not so. Which is why I have tended to steer clear of them up until now…
And they do offer VPS…
I will check them out though. I know they use a different type of admin panel, but that would not be a real problem as I use several different ones already
I’ll let you know what I think later, when I’ve been through checking them out very carefully (as I do all hosting providers by the way).
Thanks again
I’ll reply to the other thing tomorrow, but wanted to give you this. http://www.hostingreviewsbyusers.com/
Hostgator has 98% and Dreamhost is 63% if you want to go by that. So, yeah, I’m glad you mentioned your thoughts on Dreamhost, I found that link shortly after I posted my message about it.
[...] I had Hosting Stress and now I am having Internet Stress. In fact, as I write this post, I am not online at all, just [...]