Distractions
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It’s been a frustrating couple of weeks. Numerous things have distracted me to the extent that the whole “leaving the day job” thing has been on hold. I won’t bore you with most of the details but one is of interest : web hosting.
Initially I was using shared hosting from a well known US host. Obviously, shared hosting is far from ideal when you’re using it to run a business but I had an account already and I figured I could always upgrade once things got up and running. Unfortunately I was wrong. My web sites have been up and down like a thing that goes up and down a lot over the past weeks and I’ve been forced to put all my ad campaigns on hold until I can find a reliable host.
So I’ve been looking into virtual and dedicated hosting. Boy is there a wide diversity of setups and prices! The best prices are to be found in the US where the hosting market is more advanced but two things worry me about hosting in the States. For one, there is the issue of latency. The bits of data have further to travel and that can impact on the user experience. Secondly, support. A lot of places say they offer 24/7/365 support but experience tells me that the overnight part is likely to be one guy on his own. This is far from ideal when their “overnight” is your “during the day”.
UK hosting prices are ridiculous. Generally they’re more than double their US counterparts and, as I’ve discovered this week, they may claim to be British but actually have their servers elsewhere in Europe. For example, 1&1 are based in Germany.
So after much searching I signed up for a VPS with Webfusion. Big mistake. They advertise that they have UK data centres. What they don’t mention is that they also have German ones and that’s where their VPS servers live. Annoying to have been misled but not a showstopper. Ping times were still good.
Second problem: Virtuozzo. For the uninitiated, a VPS is a single physical server divided by software to resemble multiple separate servers. Virtuozzo is one of the software packages that provide such services. It’s very popular not least because it allows overselling. In other words you don’t have a guaranteed share of the server resources. Again, annoying but not a showstopper.
What did turn out to be a showstopper though was Webfusion’s support. One of the things they advertise about their VPS package is that if you balls up the server you can do a clean reinstall from the control panel. So I logged on and tried a few things out always with the intention that I would do a clean reinstall after I’d kicked the tyres a bit so I could start properly. Tried to do the reinstall and the server died. Reinstall failed. Tried again. Failed again.
Emailed support. Got a response about 6 hours later asking me for the root password. Tried to log in myself and realised that my password no longer worked and I was locked out too. Several days later and Webfusion still haven’t got my server back online. I’ve told them not to bother and to cancel my account. It’s one thing to break a server on your own but another thing altogether when the ISP’s own control panel, used exactly as intended, does the job for you.
I’m now enjoying a seven day free trial with a Dutch company Budget Dedicated. They use Xen virtualisation which is far nicer than Virtuozzo as it gives you dedicated resources, near native speed and all the freedom you’d get with a real dedicated server. Ping times from the UK are fantastic and they have an IRC support channel so you can get immediate answers when you have a quick question. I think they may be getting my business.
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