site hosting tragedy
July 18, 2002 04:47 PM

My webhost sent me an automated reminder to renew my hosting account. Okay, good. But the link in the reminder email took me to nothing. So I emailed. Nothing. Emailed another address. Nothing. Emailed sales, thinking surely sales would care. Nothing.

The hosting account expires in two weeks, or so they say. Last time a similar event happened on another domain (in that case, no reminder was received, despite what the host said), my site was deleted entirely. Then Spider Hosts said I had to sign up for a new account if I wanted to have my site hosted. This was exceptionally funny, as they were currently not accepting new orders. In fact, they are still, some months later, not accepting new orders.

I suppose the lesson I'm to learn from this is not to host with these guys. But I have to say, the uptime and reliability of the site have been excellent. So much so that, when I temporarily switched to Cyberpixels, I was appalled by the hideous level of downtime. I should demand my money back, but I needed somewhere to park the damned zine, even if I'm doing nothing with it for now.

Still. I make a lot more money now than I did when I started this site. And although the site, obviously, is purely a vanity, my entire household is now dependent on our email accounts. What I need, then, is your help. Your advice, actually.

I want a robust Linux host. I want real 99% uptime, no guarantees with sneaky language behind them. I would prefer a reasonably small host who doesn't host their servers at Rackspace and isn't popular with the preteen set. I don't want unlimited anything. I don't want to have to run my Greymatter and Movable Type in a cgi-bin directory. Ideally, I'd like a host that can split one large account into three to four smaller ones, so I don't have to worry about renewing all of my damned sites all the time. I don't want a host that limits what I can and cannot run on my site (other than warez and hardcore porn - for the server load that implies, not some moralistic reason). And I obviously need to run PHP, Perl, Berkley DB and MySQL.

Do you know anything like that? I wouldn't mind paying $250 a year for my three sites, if they worked all the time.

[Update] To make things even funnier, it appears that my account doesn't actually expire until February (finally heard from a human on this one). Of course, I'm still getting the damned automated emails. It appears the automated response system has lost it, but it's nice to know I have time to contemplate my next move.