Well you probably noticed that my sites went down for a few days if you’ve become a regular visitor of The Web Files or any of my other sites.
I ended up changing web hosts after my former web host attempted to change my shared hosting account over to a TWO year Virtual Private Hosting account and charged me $642 in the process. A move and charge that I hadn’t authorized.
I’d been apparently having CPU resource issues on my former host – Lunarpages, and I worked for close to a month to resolve any CPU resource overuse issues by going over everything in my directories with a fine toothed comb, updating all of the programs that I use to run my various sites and any addons or plugins that I used with those sites and still they kept telling me that I had CPU resource over use issues.
They suspended my account on Saturday stating that my account had almost caused a server to crash so I reluctantly agreed to change my account over to VPS for one month. One single month. It took me almost 24 hours to communicate that desire to support since they are very slow to answer support email and do not have telephone support over the weekend.
Once they apparently understood that I was willing to switch over to VPS for one month they told me that it would cost $75 per hour to transfer my account, but if I wanted I could do it myself once the VPS account was set up. At that point I said No way to the $75 charge and in fact said no to the whole deal until they sent me more info about VPS, Plesk and how I might move my account on my own.
Instead of sending me information they went ahead and set up the VPS account and instead of creating a monthly account they charged me for two years of VPS service.
Right … for CPU resource issues that may or may not exist.
I say may or may not exist because after the stunt they pulled charging me for a two year VPS account I’m not all that certain that I ever had CPU resource issues.
So I spent early Monday morning creating a new hosting account at HostGator and worked on moving my domains and sites.
So far things are going well with HostGator and they’ve yet to mention a thing about CPU resource over use. Still – I think I’m going to continue going over my sites and try to lighten their load on the servers. Some of my sites are getting more and more popular so if my traffic is increasing so will my resource usage too.
I’ve been using HostGator for quite some time with good results. Don’t expect tech support to help much if you have a very technical issue, as they are pretty much scripted, provide you a link to their knowledgebase, and that’s about it. Other than that, downtime has been minimal. Good luck.
Yes I think tech support at a lot of web hosting companies isn’t all that useful if you have a real problem. Good to hear that you are happy with HostGator though.
Tricia,
I found link to this article via Andy’s blog. I do have a web hosting plan with BlueHost myself, but have seen the CPU message a few times. I am not two careful about plugins I use on my blog, so maybe PHP processes overload things a bit. It actually made me think to go “Blogger”, but I ma so used to WordPress now that I would hate use blogger again. Sorry to her about your troubles.
Did you get dedicated hosting with HostGator? Would you mind offering your opinion at http://www.web-hostingreview.com/host-gator/ ? Feel free to review LunarPages as well.
How do you like HostGator? I was looking at them the other day. I have been trying to add another website to the same hosting account I’m assuming thats what shared hosting is? Do you know how to add a completley seperate website to the same hosting account?
Stories like this have me worried; I’m wanting to get off of blogger and onto a hosted server… I’ve got notoriously bad luck, so you’re situation will happen to me within the first week, probably.
So sorry to hear about your woes. There appears to be quite a number of unscrupulous hosts.
A friend of mine was dumped 3 times by hosts within 2 weeks without notice due large traffic influxes. All took their annual fee upfront and wouldn’t return the fees.
I’m being forced to find a new host for the very same reason, as a recent post came within 1% of crashing my host’s server, so they took the post down rather than dumping me, and have given me advance notice to find a new host.
My current host recommended BlueHost, but I’m glad I didn’t follow his lead after hearing Vlad’s comment. My friend recommended Media Temple, stating that he has friends that have survived the Digg effect without issues or notice to dump them, so that’s who I’m currently in the process of switching over to.
He also recommended Hurricane Electric a he.net but said they’re unix and advanced so you have to know your stuff and they offer little support.