Last Friday, from 12:48 to 19:18 (6 1/2 hours) I was not able to upload files to my MODx installation. Four support techs ended up getting involved. At one point, I was told I’d have to wait until Monday! Finally, they figured out that MODx requires lower case file extensions (jpg, png, and such).
"tmdhosting.com/modx-hosting.html" says "Our Support Team is highly skilled and very experienced with MODx. They will be on immediate disposal in order to answer all your MODx related and other questions!"
The same page says that TMDHosting is "a leading MODx hosting provider."
I weighed TMDHosting against the field of competing hosts for MODx. I know that the quoted statements are subjective somewhat, but still my confidence in my host is shaken now that it took 6 1/2 hours for the MODx "highly skilled and very experienced" support to figure out something so fundamental. True the issue is a MODx issue, not really a host issue, but it’s such a fundamental issue that it shouldn’t even require skill or experience to solve.
I am not a system admin or otherwise "highly skilled and very experienced" in anything but writing, which is one of the biggest reasons I decided to use MODx. I am a writer, not a technical person, and I’m a MODx rank beginner. I WANT to depend on the expertise and reliability of TMDHosting as much as my customers depend on mine. Again, I WANT to anyway, but my confidence in TMDHosting is really shaken now.
I fire bad customers. To me a bad customer is one who is rude, doesn’t pay promptly, tries to "cheat" contractual agreements, and such, but if a customer has a legitimate issue, and I’m to blame, that makes the customer just that, not a bad customer. I hope this experience is not typical of what I should expect from TMDHosting, but it does set a precedent.
-Dave
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Are you referring to uploading via the File Manager, in the MODx Manager?
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Well, that’s not true. All you have to do is go to the Configuration (Tools->Configuration) and the File Manager tab. There’s a field with a long list of allowable file types. Just add JPG, PNG, GIF, whatever in upper case.
Next time, just post on the forums. I guarantee you’ll have a solution in a whole lot less than 6.5 hours!
pulllease... helpful comments only if you please. I’m no cheapscape. I’ve been down the road of 1and1, hostgator, and one or two others that promise to deliver on a shoestring and then fail. Sure you get what you pay for, but what I’m paying TMDHosting is not the cheapest available.
I appeal to your recommendations, Susan and Ryan.
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Unless your site is liable to be moderately busy, you should do fine. Just don’t expect them to be serious about MODx support. They also offer PHPNuke, as well as a number of other applications. I doubt that they are "expert" in any of them.
Unfortunately it is all too true that the cheap hosting companies are so cheap because they overload their servers; you can have 400 or more domains hosted all on one server, all using one poor MySQL installation, plus email. That might be OK for blog sites about people’s kittens or goldfish or whatever, but if you get any traffic at all it just can’t handle it.
So it all boils down to what you’re doing. I host five domains, two are mine and the other three are for friends or non-profits I’m managing for the good karma
so I have a virtual private server, for $30 a month. It’s a Solaris server, and unmanaged; on the other hand it’s all pretty much already set up for a single domain.
Thanks, Susan. Now I feel like I’m getting somewhere in the way I’ve been hoping for.
If $30/month... $360/year or however you want to slice it is the cost for what I’m after, then so be it. Trying to beat the system is the mark of a hack amateur. By the same token, spending injudiciously without due diligence is the mark of--well--someone that ends up running out of money and then fails.
At any rate, I’m prepared to bear the burden of doing this thing right. Susan, I first found out about you when I discovered MODx back in January, I think. I wished then that I could contact you, so I’m ecstatic to be in contact with you now.
As fascinating as MODx may be to developers, I am not one. I am a writer. Honestly, I couldn’t care less about under the hood. All I have interest in is creating content and the end result of layouts. In other words, I know (1) what to say and (2) what I want it to look like. Can you help me not waste time with a dog of a host and a dog of a deal? (I love dogs by the way. Maybe "pig" is better.) Should I go with a virtual dedicated server? Can you puuuullllleeeassse recommend a host??!!!
Because I am operating on a shoestring out of necessity, I have to be my own developer, for what little "developing" I may need. Based on my research of CMSs, I hope and anticipate just adapting templates that others have developed, realizing that I may need to pay for some of it. Again, I’m not cheap. I realize that quality comes at a price. I realize too that I may have to compromise. I repeat, I’m a writer concerned primarily with content, so under-the-hood stuff is of distant secondary importance to me.
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If you don’t come up with anything else, and you think their $15 a month or the $30 a month vps would serve you, I’ll help you with any admin tasks you need to do. If you’ve only got the one site, there’s very little to do.
By the way, they supply email through their separate LDAP servers, so your server doesn’t have to take on that load.
http://entic.net/
