I've been on a skiing holiday for a week... so hence no response to this post, and the outage. I had no internet connection up in the Alps where I was.
No, the internet hoster is NOT the best hoster. When I selected them 2 or more years ago, they had rave reviews, and very happy customers. They were a small outfit, and the transition to them went very smoothly and I saved the group money in the process.
About 6 months after we went over, the company got bought. Service went down. Monitoring of the system has become haphazard. Normally, when I'm around, I'm able to contact them pretty quickly. However, if I'm not, it may take a day or more for them to take action.
What are the problems with large scale webhosters? They put too many customers on one machine. If one of these customers has a rogue program, or a heavy load, he may bring down the database server (which drives the website). This is a fairly frequent occurrence with the current hoster.
The issue? We're stuck with this contract until January 2011. Moving to another hoster is a procedure which must be well planned, and takes me a couple of days.
There are many large scale hosters, offering low cost service. I believe we've outgrown them. We would need to move to a much more reliable service (costing perhaps four or fice times what we pay today... so $1000 instead of $200 per annum) for it to have a noticeable effect. This should not be a shared service, but have a dedicated machine with a good backup and monitoring plan. That's where the money goes.
Or alternatively, we live with some downtime. :'(
Peter
