Poor web hosting services

[fingal]

A friend of mine has set up a community Forum for like-minded people to post their ideas and - from time to time - creative work. I joined a while ago, and things have changed a lot.

Amazingly - although he prefers to have the Forum hosted on Linux servers - he can't find one single reliable host! Most service providers offer different packages, including the option to host on Windows. He decided to go for the Redhat deal with his current provider, but after only a few days the site went down.

He had exactly the same problem with his previous host, and the story is always the same:

'Our tech guys are dealing with it. We'll have it back up as soon as possible.'

Notice the lack of an apology. Someone pointed out that this could be seen as a legal admission of liability... To me, it seems like a very strange way to run a service of any kind!

It's becoming obvious that 'the tech guys' know absolutely nothing about how to run Linux servers. They understand Windows, but - and this is an actual quote - 'Linux is harder to sort out.' Yep - too hard for them anyway.

These people are taking money under false pretences while pretending to offer reliable hosting with '99% up-time'. A common claim which our little online community has yet to see.

So if any of you are thinking of setting yourselves up as *nix hosts, you might as well! You would probably do a better job that the so-called professionals.

[daark.child]

I've had better luck using United Hosting. I have had a reseller account for about 3 years and rarely have I faced any downtime or support tickets that have taken more than a couple of hours to resolve. They use CentOS on their shared hosting servers and they also have CentOS dedicated servers.

[fingal]

I've had better luck using United Hosting. I have had a reseller account for about 3 years and rarely have I faced any downtime or support tickets that have taken more than a couple of hours to resolve. They use CentOS on their shared hosting servers and they also have CentOS dedicated servers.

Thanks for the tip daark child - if our problems continue I'll pass that info. to my friend. He's having a hard time!

[darkrose0510]

Hence why I self host, and host several friends' sites...

Mind you, I'm yet to find a stable ftp server with MySQL authentication, whenever I set that up RAM starts getting eaten and apache shuts down, I suspect many web hosts are having similar problems.

[fingal]

Hence why I self host, and host several friends' sites...

Mind you, I'm yet to find a stable ftp server with MySQL authentication, whenever I set that up RAM starts getting eaten and apache shuts down, I suspect many web hosts are having similar problems.

It might be that! The Forum I mentioned runs on Joomla and Fireboard, and I know my friend has been ftp'ing in and out. I believe MySQL sits behind the site somewhere (my knowledge of Joomla is very limited).