So my hosting company, HostGator, sucks. Seriously. Here is what happened.
First, I ask a simple question: When are you going to upgrade to PHP 5 and MySQL 5? The reason I asked them is because PHP 5 has been out for months and is a zillion times better than PHP 4, and MySQL 5 has been out for quite a while as well, and now allows triggers and stored procedures, which are two features that I’ve been wanting for quite a while now. I don’t think it is too much to ask for your web host to have the latest stable versions of the basic software neccessary to run your website.
So the guy replies and ignorantly states that they will support it as soon as it shows up on the plan details page of their website. So I take a peek at the plan details page, and guess what? It says “PHP4 or 5″. So I email this guy back and say I want PHP 5 and he then lets me know that yes, they do have a server running the newer versions, and asks if I want moved over. I of course say yes.
So he emails me back asking me for my domain name, username, and password. I reply telling him I don’t want to send my password plain text via email, so I verify another way. Already I’m getting quite frustrated at the time this is taking. I just want to use MySQL 5 dangit!
So FINALLY my site is moved over, everything appears to be working, things are great. Wonderful.
Until this morning when I notice all my database users are gone and my webpages are broadcasting to the world the structure of my websites and the usernames I use. Great. Just great. Now I have to change all my users.
So I try to fix this myself. Before I had my site moved to the v5 server, I made a full backup using cPanel’s automated backup generator. You can’t just load this yourself for some idiot reason, so I open it up and find the .sql file that contains my user information. I attempt to load it. Unfortunately, because I have limited access it doesn’t let me load the users.
So I forward this file to support and ask them to load it for me. I mark the ticket as critical because, well, it is critical. None of my websites work without databases. Support replies and asks the stupid question of what the usernames and passwords were for all my databases and they will manually load them for me. Like I’m too freaking stupid to do that myself or something. The problem is, I don’t know what the usernames and passwords are. It isn’t like I keep a text file with all my confidential information in it. So I again tell them to just load the *%$#& file so my sites will start working, and it has been 2 hours with no reply. Finally got sick of waiting and had to waste 45 minutes digging through my web files searching for usernames and passwords so I can manually load everything.
Needless to say, I am HIGHLY disappointed with HostGator. I’m looking at moving to DreamHost or perhaps getting a dedicated server somewhere. At least on a dedicated server if something gets broke it is my fault and I can just fix it.
2 Comments
so it is a little late in internet time( what like 4 days), but I can vouch for dreamhost, been using them for 2 years or now. They have a funky user control panel, but if you do everything via ssh then it doesn’t really matter. Incidentally I am using their shared hosting plan, $8 a month for some crazy space and 1.2 TB bandwidth(both the space and bandwidth increase over time).
Another company I like, is hostdime, I host all of my business accounts there because they use cpanel for their user panel which is pleasant for my more non-technical users. Only problem with them is that their datacenter is in florida, which is all well and good, as long is there isn’t a massive hurricane. two years ago, when one of the hurricanes hit, all of my sites went down for a day, which all things considered isn’t too shabby since it pretty much wiped out the area they are in.
So if it is for just yourself, and you aren’t going to be hosting other people(or all the people are as technically savvy as you) then I would use dreamhost. You can resell the space (i think i have 75 accounts) but you will have to do all the installations and server side stuff (emails, subdomains, etc). If you are planning on selling off the space you aren’t using, hostdime makes it easy with the webhosting manager (whm), so you create an account and send the client a username and password and let them have at it.
Oh, and both support teams are good, sometime excellent. :-)
And finally I have an account with 1and1.com (I got one of the free 3year developer accounts when they were just moving into the US market) but I don’t use them for much other than domain registration($6/year). There support .. . has been lackluster, although that could be due to the fact that nearly all of my questions to them have been concerning obscure dns issues which most of the lowbie support people have no idea about, or possibly because my account was free, eh who knows.
i don’t know anything about wordpress, but do you think you could add <ul> and <li> to the allowable xhtml codes?
and I totally dig the fake-person generator, haha, it is awesome, nice coding!
i’ve used dreamhost. they’re very good. but i use westhost now. they have a virtual private server setup, and they stay pretty current with regards to releases and upgrades (Although they *are* still on MySQL 4).
with the vps setup, you can pretty much upgrade whenever you feel like it, as soon as it’s available on your account. that’s perfect, if, for some reason you have code that was built on MySQL 3.2.3 and are scared to upgrade.