or a while now I haven’t been happy with my hosting at Media Temple. I have a Dedicated Virtual (DV) account with them, as well as a Grid Service (GS) account, and host this blog, I’m With The Band, and the Newcastle Coffee Mornings website on it.
Considering that it’s a DV account, and not part of a shared grid, I would’ve thought that it would’ve easily been able to handle the traffic and databases for these couple of sites, but apparently not as I’ve had all sorts of slow loading issues and server problems, and really for the $50 odd I pay per month the support, ie. ‘you’ve got a DV account so you’re on your own’, has been lacking considerably.
Last weekend while surfing around I came across a link on Chris Pearson’s blog where he was promoting midPhase hosting and their ‘Quick Switch’ service. The idea of Quick Switch is that if you bring your hosting over to midpPhase they’ll move all your files to their servers and sort out all the mucking around, coz lets face it the hardest part about moving hosting is stuffing around with databases and files and moving the whole lot and trying to do it without effecting your website too much. I’m thinking this is too good to be true!
Well it is.
Sign up was easy, I filled in the Quick Switch form with all the imwiththeband.com domain details and I thought that would be it.
5 minutes later I receive all my account details, logins, ftp details, etc. so now I can login to my account and do whatever I want. huzzah! this is going well.
Around 2-3 hours later I get an email saying that they can’t do the Quick Switch because my MediaTemple DV account uses a Plesk control panel, and not cpanel. So they suggest I give them the Plesk details and ftp details and also a copy of the database, no problem. I get all that done and a email them off the details, an hour later I get a “Your files and databases have been transferred over. Please let us know if you have any further questions.” email. huzzah! that was awesomely easy, I’m going to recommend these guys to everyone!
Sweet, so I can login to that ‘preview your domain’ link you sent me on signup….no, that actually links to someone else’s website. Ok, so now I’m starting to get a little anxious, but hey no biggie I’m sure it’s something minor but I don’t have the time right now to chase it so I’ll check it out tomorrow……
So now it’s tomorrow, the 24th of November, and I get an email from midPhase billing about renewing my domain name…huh I thought I only host with you. A minute or so later I get an email from some domain name management organisation saying that there’s a request to transfer imwiththeband.com to midPhase, ahh screw it I’m happy enough to move my domain over to them to handle the DNS and all that, it’ll probably be easier in the long run.
I tried again to get onto the preview domain link that midPhase sent me, still resolves to someone else’s website. I’m thinking, ’surely midPhase have a twitter account, I’ll talk to them’. After finding midPhase on twitter I tweet them and they respond with;
@matpacker “Noticed you were making the move
How’s it going?”
@Midphase not too bad, though can’t see the domain in the ‘preview’ thing, files were all moved by you guys. Will be working on it today..
@matpacker Great, let us know if your domain is not showing up. Can be an easy fix
By now @Midphase has followed me on twitter, so I figure I’ll direct message them, that’ll surely get things moving along.
url is live, www.imwiththeband.com but not sure if it’s on your servers or mediatemple. not showing on http://206.217.192.184:2082/imwipac6
and the clock starts ticking away, and away, and away, and away…… 2 days later and still no response.
And now it’s today, 27th of November, and still no response from anyone at midPhase…way to man your twitter account guys. I emailed them this morning, and yes I know it’s about to be Thanksgiving in the US so I’m not expecting a response straight away but still if you say you provide good support you’d want to actually back that up with errrrr good support.
I still struggle to believe that good hosting, and support by domain hosts, is still so hard to come by. I’ve keeping myself familiar with the hosting troubles the guys over at Inquisitr.com have been having, and it appears it almost doesn’t matter how little or how much you spend they’re all the same.
At this point in time I don’t know what to do…and no Square Space isn’t an option.
Anyway I’ll leave you with my final tweet to midPhase this morning;
@Midphase hi, direct messaged you guys and had no response. just sent an email too. this is probably a good test of your support I guess..
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Matt,
I feel your pain, I’ve been through it that many times too. I have to say though, since I’ve been dealing with Rochen I’ve actually found that their service is impeccable. I have logged many issues with them and have never had to wait more than 10 minutes for a response at any time 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
I have also been dealing with Hostgator a bit more recently as a cheaper alternative to Rochen for some of my less demanding sites, and their service has been excellent too. Their response is usually within 15 minutes 24 hours a day 7 days a week, but the initial response is not always as helpful as with Rochen. I’m quite happy with it though.
I’ve not tried either of their site moving services to be able to comment on them, but based on their service in every other area, I would be surprised if it is not a relatively smooth process with them, especially Rochen.
Hey thanks for the comment Matt, might give Rochen a look as I haven’t heard anything about them good, bad, or otherwise…. Hostgator on the other hand is one I’ve been told to avoid by quite a few people.
Hostgator I’ve only had one major issue with, which it turns out may have actually been caused by Telstra. I couldn’t access any site on my hosting IP address using their domain names, unless I accessed it via the IP. Tested it on a TPG and Vodafone connection though and it worked fine. It also worked fine on the Telstra connection through a proxy server, so it seems like it was probably Telstra, but I really wouldn’t know. They were very helpful in trying to figure out what actually happened, though the first couple of people to respond to my issue weren’t very knowledgeable about DNS issues – in saying that, it clearly stated in the support ticket response that they were junior technicians and that my issue had been forwarded to a senior technician etc and he was very knowledgeable about it all.
I’ve had a few smaller issues aside from that, but nothing serious and the service and response has always been quite acceptable for the price they charge. Their shared servers can be a bit slow to respond sometimes though.
Rochen though any problem I have always seems to get answered immediately by someone who knows everything about that topic, they always provide warning if there is going to be any downtime, quick response to issues, very knowledgeable staff, from memory I’ve had a total of about 1 hour down time in 3 years with them (that I am aware of). I have also never had any speed issues with them. I was quite impressed to find how strictly they control server loads to ensure that one user can’t slow everyone else down, on both their virtual managed servers and shared servers. They certainly aren’t the cheapest provider, but they aren’t expensive either and are well worth the price they charge.
Rochen are sounding pretty good.
Since tweeting this blog I’ve had all sorts of suggestions as to what to do, most of them would have me hosting with $4.95 a month grid plans which is just not going to happen.
Anyway, I think I will make my decision slowly as I don’t want to end up in a worse situation.
That’s always a good plan! The $4.95 grid plans really aren’t worth it for anything beyond a low priority, low traffic website (despite some of their unlimited bandwidth claims).
By the way, the “Notify me of followup comments” email that your blog sends out is blank, even the sending user and subject are blank. I assume they come from here anyway since everytime I’ve received one there’s been a comment here and it’s the only place I’ve checked the followup box on recently.
Thanks for the feedback on the ‘notify’ box, I had no idea that was happening! I’ve sorted it out now and you’ll probably get an email shortly…and maybe this time there will be some text in it! haha
No worries mate, looks like it’s working correctly now, got an email clearly telling me where it was from and what it was for!
As a general rule, your host and registrar should be two different companies.
I’m surprised you had trouble with MT. How much traffic do you get to that DV account and did you look to see what scripts were slowing you down? MT has the best tools out there to catch slow scripts.
Completely agree with @Ferodynamics.
You want to be able to flick your website to another host whenever you want. If your hosting company goes sour and they are preventing you from moving the domain away from them you are stuck.
Yeh I agree also, I got onto GoDaddy and had them cancel the transfer request that midPhase had put through. It was cancelled within minutes, and since then I’ve cancelled my midPhase account so hopefully it’s all sorted for now.
I ended up buying another mediatemple GS account, which will be dedicated to handling just imwiththeband.com as currently it’s among 20 odd domains on another GS account.
The saga is over for now………….