A Hosting Lesson Learned - The Hard Way

• Posted by B Jones on December 20th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »

Some of you may have noticed over the past few days that there have been some major problems here at SEOlogs. Most of them are currently in the tools section, but the blog was also down for a bit.

This is because of a major failure on the part of the site I was hosting with. I’m not going to name any names, because they seem like nice enough guys, but if you’ve been reading the blog, you probably know who.

The reason I switched to this most recent host was because I was having a lot of problems with the prior hosting company (same reason as the time before ). There was just way too much down time, and if it wasn’t going down, it was just slowing down to a snail’s pace.

I was stubborn about switching hosts the first time, but after reading some really good reviews about this company, and speaking to some of the guys that work there, I was pretty much sold, and went ahead and made the switch.

Before I go any further, let me just say that moving SEOlogs.com is not easy. It’s actually extremely difficult. First there’s dealing with the size limits of moving the wordpress posts to a the new database. That’s a pain, but it’s nothing compared to getting all the seo tools up and functioning properly again.

Ok. Back to the story.

After making the switch, and getting all the tools working again, the new host was great. The site was loading noticeably faster, I liked the new admin interface, it was all peaches, until about a week later when I went to check something out on the site, and it was down. No long loading delay, just plain straight to the “Server Not Found” screen.

I called, and immediately reached tech support. Just like when I spoke with sales, this was a real person at the company, not outsourced tech support, and though I was alarmed about the site being down, I was really impressed with the fast response. They had it working again pretty quickly, so I decided to let that one slide.

About 2 weeks later, it happened again, and this time support wasn’t so great, I couldn’t get anyone on the phone. I also couldn’t get anyone via their “24 hour live chat”. The site was down for over an hour this time. This was just not good at all, so at this point, I decided to go ahead and start the process of moving the site to my dedicated machine that I already host dnscoop.com on.

I did everything except for pulling the nameserver entries. I seriously considered it, but I thought I’d give them one more chance.

That chance came last Tuesday when I just happened to check out the tools page, and noticed that I could see the PHP code on the page.

There it was. All of the code from my 20 plus SEO tools there on the screen for the taking. I’m not sure how long this was going on for, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some new SEO tools sites start to pop up soon. Not to mention, people got to see how sloppy my PHP coding is.

I made the call, and got someone on the phone. He told me that they had upgraded the PHP install on the server, and that they had seen this problem with a few other sites. But unfortunately, the guy who could help wouldn’t be in for another 30 minutes.

That definitely was not the right answer. I redirected all traffic to my personal site, with a message explaining what was happening, then I went ahead and updated the name server entries.

So now, SEOlogs.com lives with his little brother, dnScoop.com on their own private island of dedicated hosting happiness. It’s what I should have done in the first place, but I had my reasons for keeping them separate (It has nothing to do with SEO).

I am seriously considering just doing what Aaron Wall has done, and going open source with most of my tools. That way, maybe some others could help with keeping the code working.

The moral of the story is that good hosting is hard to come by. Just because a host is great for someone else, doesn’t mean that it will be great for you too. The opposite is also true, just because a lot of people say it’s no good, doesn’t mean it’s true.

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