When to give up on a host? Does history count?

I have been with the same host for @4 years starting as a reseller and moving up to a VPS. Over the years there have been some failures (all servers fail) and although at the time it was a drag in the long run it was tolerable. During this time I have built up a trust relationship with them believing that they were on top of things and watching out issues. It is a small host, I used to know the entire support staff by name (which was nice) and would receive communications from the president if I had any issues. My final upgrade was to a 1024MB VPS a little over a year ago and the server had been running great for a while (which kept me away from support). In janurary my server had a RAID Rebuild which knocked us off for 4 days, and this was when all started to go down hill with constant problems and stuff like having my server migrated without my knowledge. Since Jan 16th my server has been restarted by them 18 times and never a notice.

Anyway, I think I have had enough and it’s time to try my luck elsewhere. But it is hard to let go of the ’old’ established trust from before. Am I a fool to stick around after all this recent trouble? After all, there are other reliable hosts around...but there is so much @#$#@ as well. I know that my current host means well. Arghhh, who needs this extra stress!!!

Anyone recommend a good cPanel VPS host?

I’m pretty happy with my Clook VPS, although it’s a bit pricey, and they do have the ssh login as root which I really don’t like, but they limit the ssh login by IP address which helps mitigate that.

They just upgraded all of their servers, but they were very prolific with communications about exactly what was going on and when, and gave the vps clients a choice of days for the upgrade.

The only "panic" I’ve had was the mysql server went down and I just by chance happened to be looking at one of the sites when it happened, but I went in to the main control panel and restarted the server, only to find that it had already been automatically restarted. And support is very quick and responsive. So far I have little to complain about.

I checked them out based on a previous post of yours. They look good and your endorsement is a good one...but they are a bit over my current budget, being in euros and the US$ so low and all

I will add them to my short list, thanks

FYI, in case anyone is curious I currently host at HostForWeb. They are pretty open about problems and post them on their public forum (which is rare among hosts): http://forums.hostforweb.com/forumdisplay.php3?f=3

They have a US datacenter, which is in dollars, but don’t offer vps there yet. They say they will "soon".

I guess they want to keep me around since I was bumped up to a lightning fast box overnight (after ranting on for a while with support). I still have 4 months on my yearly plan so I will look around and maybe hire a second "light" vps someplace else to test the waters. Since I posted on their private forum about my problem a few other old timers have chimed in with similar scenarios so there is something going on.

I am inclined to give these guys a chance to sort things out since I have been there for such a long time and normally they have great support (fast and competent) so I should not let the latest events cloud all the previous good experiences. But, on the other hand, I need to be confident that the server will run. I was presenting a finished job the other day and the client kept getting "unable to locate" server errors and thought it was a problem with the site itself...that took some explaining to straighten out bit did not look good for us, "the web experts can’t even keep their own server running".

While I have not personally had experience with them jumpline.com are an exclusive VDS/VPS company. Their servers seem fast and their prices are not bad. I had a client who was on their services (but I felt it was overpriced for a non critical, non commerce site when a shared server (mine) works very well.

I have been with Hostdime for nearly 5 years and while there was a major outage in October (server fire) they have very good customer service, fast 24hour-7day live people. I mainly use a shared reseller account for my small business clients as cost/service ratio is very good. The consideration that makes me wonder if I ought to look at another solution is that that failure in October took 4 days to recover from as the raid array was damaged and they had to recover from tape.

Another really good host is BlackSun, based in Saskatchewan Canada. They are pricey but again great personal service.

jumpline.com looks interesting and is affordable...The screenshots of their control panel look complete enough (I am used to cPanel but as long as others are complete I am willing to try it out, I don’t really like the limited experiance I have had with Plesk though).

Thanks for the tips.

Yes, I absolutely hate Plesk. It is slow and unfriendly. I would much rather have cPanel 11 and WHM over it. I don’t mind Sun’s Control Panel (formerly QUBE/RAQ). Hostdime does have VDS (virtuozzo) with whatever you want on it.

Cheers,

Jay

cPanel and WHM are great. I hosts about 20 sites at rochenhost.com and couldn’t be happier. They were my 4th host provider in 7 years.

The only drawback to hosting on Linux with them is that they - like every other Linux host I know - restrict emails to 1000/day going on. And diy uo devs know that last summer the big ISPs (such as comcast, AOL, Yahoo, et al) changed the way they filter emails? Instead of putting domains on a list, they put entire blocks of IP#s.

The way around that restriction is to host your sites on a dedicated server, but one again, the big ISPs will block that IP#.

The only solution I’ve come up with is Gmail. Anybody else have good email ideas, such as Fusemail?

In my opinion, anybody needing to send a mailing to more than 1,000 a day should be using one of the dedicated mailing services. I’ve used them for some clients and they’re quite nice. Most of them charge per mailing, with a sliding scale depending on the number of mailings, and the cost is quite reasonable.