Tag: hosting

How I Did It

…picked a new web host, that is.

In recent comments, I got asked how I decided which web host to switch to once I gave up on Powweb. Truth is, it was not easy, and I very nearly re-upped with Powweb again, on the theory “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” But over the last 4 years, Powweb has gone from being a great company to one that I barely tolerated. I couldn’t bring myself to give them the $$ for another year. So I switched.

Finding a new host was definitely not a one-time project. I collected information on and off over the course of many months, from a number of sources. Those include word-of-mouth reports from other web folks on 2 mailing lists (WWWAC and SF-WOW) and reports from friends (like Glen). That gave me some anecdotal evidence to start with. Another site that was helpful for giving feedback and potential hosting company names was the WebHosting Talk forums.

I tended to avoid the various websites that list or rate web hosts, since many of them gave the impression of being basically advertising vehicles for the hosting companies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but I wanted user feedback more than anything else. Basic web hosting is so much of a commodity these days that I was more concerned with customer satisfaction within the price point I’d chosen (under $100 a year) than the nitty-gritty of exactly how many MBs of disk space or how many e-mail accounts I’d get with my service. I also gave bonus points to companies that had an actual customer forum, not just a one-way support desk.

I looked at Dreamhost, Laughing Squid, Media Temple, Lunarpages, 1 and 1, iPowerWeb, and a few others before deciding that A2 looked good. I did some more digging into A2, looking for reports of dissatisfied customers, outages, etc. Nothing bad jumped out at me. So I filed the information away.

As I said, this happened over the course of several months. Periodically I’d re-check, to see if opinion about a company was trending one way or another (increased outages, reports of slowness / overselling, etc). A2 still looked good.

Eventually, my old contract was about to run out, and it was time to push the button, one way or the other. So I took a deep breath and signed up with A2. And here I am.

That’s a little longwinded, but it’s the story of how I chose a new web host. I hope it helps someone.

Powweb Hosting Woes

So, this spring, Powweb, the company I use for my webhosting was sold. This caused me some concern, because it was announced to customers that as a part of the deal, all the sites hosted on the old web servers would be migrated to some new servers. And oh yea, that would involve an OS switch from FreeBSD to Linux.

I have my preferences for OSes, but I’m hardly a zealot on the subject. FreeBSD and Linux are both perfectly acceptable platforms for web hosting, and I’m not going to get too upset about which one my hosting company uses. However, I also know that switching from one OS to another is bound to cause problems. Things are installed in different places, some modules may not be installed at all, paths change … in short, it tends to break stuff. I was concerned.

My site is not all that complex. I have a copy of Movable Type and a copy of Gallery up and running, and I have only one plug-in that touches my otherwise vanilla installation — MT-Blacklist. It’s a critical part of my website because it makes managing the trackback and comment spam that are the plague of a blogger really simple.

So of course, Powweb’s migration of my site from the old servers to the new ones managed to utterly break MT-Blacklist.

If you’re interested, here’s the error I get when I try to use MT-Blacklist now:

An error occurred: Out of memory during “large” request for 2147487744 bytes, total sbrk() is 5480448 bytes at ../../lib/Storable.pm (autosplit into ../../lib/auto/Storable/thaw.al) line 366, at /home/users/web/b1970/[username]/htdocs/lib/MT/PluginData.pm line 28

I have done some web-based scripting, but that was a long time ago, and only using Cold Fusion. I can customize the settings on someone else’s code, and if I really focused in hard I could probably make some very basic tweaks to an existing script, but troubleshooting something like this, especially on a server where I don’t know what’s installed on it nor what the paths are, is simply beyond me.

At any rate, I opened a ticket with Powweb Support about this problem, and waited. And waited. Every other day, I would send Support an e-mail asking what was up, and each time I was told, “Please be patient, someone is working on your problem.” So I waited. And manually deleted the pings and trackback spam that I kept on getting. After Day 6, I sent a slightly more annoyed e-mail to Support saying that 6 days to fix one script was more than enough, and that moving to a new company was starting to look like a good option. I got a slightly more effusive response, explaining that the issue was being “forwarded to our senior specialist”. I started looking at new web hosts, but decided to give Support a chance to do its thing.

Today though, I finally got the much awaited response from their senior specialist. And what was it? “We Googled your problem, and here’s a blogger in December 2004 who also had this problem. Try their fix and see if that helps.”

Some “Senior Specialist”.

Now, I am pissed off. I waited 8 days thinking I was going to get some expert help, and all I got was a Google search? I can do that myself. I was expecting that someone would look at the script, notice what it calls, and then compare it to what is on the new server to see whether the switch from BSD to Linux caused modules to move, be missing, or act differently. That’s the kind of thing that I as an end-user can’t do.

Yes I know, a real geek would self-host and avoid the problem entirely. I’d rather pay for shared hosting than self-host from the DSL line in my home. Our DSL provider is good, but we do have outages from time to time, and I want the bandwidth, monitoring, uptime & redundancy that you get from a professional host.

In some ways, I’m SOL, and it’s my own fault. MT-Blacklist has been integrated into MovableType since version 3.x, and I’m still using the plug-in version with MT 2.6x, so I can’t go to the author for support: the response will be, “Upgrade”. Which I have not wanted to do, because that would entail re-customizing all of the Movable Type templates in order to get the look and feel of my site back, and I didn’t see the point of doing that when everything was working quite nicely the way it was.

With the long weekend coming up, and us not having much in the way of plans, switching web hosts and/or upgrading my Movable Type installation might be a good project to take up. But then the issue becomes — will I just be trading one set of problems for another?

*mumble grumble grr*