Monday March 10
 
21:26
 
Finding A Webhost Is Tough

A few days ago I had some problems with my webhost, phpwebhosting.com, as one of the scripts I wrote for The Korean Blog List allegedy was responsible for slow response on the server.

What shocked me is that my webhost was complaining about 100 or so instances of a php script all running at the same time.

Imagine you have a website and suddenly a robot comes in and tries to follow every link – eg on a page which lists every blog entry for a year – then that’s not something that you can control. A webserver should handle that.

When getting a hosting package, one often thinks about how much bandwidth is allowed – but it became clear to me that bandwidth is a pretty useless measure if the servers are not set up to handle high volume. What’s the point of a 10,000 GB per month allowance if your server isn’t able to serve pages that quickly? It’s only useful for photos, warez, etc – which is not what I want.

I started looking around for another host, and eventually selected dotserving.com on the recommendation of a friend, paying with my credit card at lunchtime today. And already I regret it.

Despite boasts of 60 minutes response times, etc, etc, and a mail which said “Your account will be ready within 1-3 hours”, more than 4 hours later my account was still not setup. I contact the 24 hours support line to be told to wait another 4-5 hours until billing get in.

It is complete and utter PANTS customer service. All that crap about fast response, and the first thing they do is FAIL to meet their promise of setting up the account within 1-3 hours. It’s now 9 hours later and nothing. If I didn’t know that my friend is successfully being hosted by them, I’d think that dotserving had just taken my credit card money and run.

It has made me appreciate phpwebhosting.com. Sure, I might need something that gives me a bit more of a server to play with, but their account activation was instant, and I’ve had relatively few issues with them during the 5+ years I’ve been with them.

For the “make money fast” people: Do not try posting affiliate links to webhosting companies in the comments – they will not be approved!