Just thought I'd invite some stories regarding hosting companies.

I know that sometimes its just unlucky and I dont want it to be a hole digging exercise, but its also good to know these things to learn from them.

Afrihost (shared hosting)

1. One of my domains kept going down at least an hour or 2 per day for a week
2. after various support emails, they said it was good.
3. a week later it happened again and again
4. it took a month, but eventually I managed to get them to move me to another server.
5. if they did that, it worked, or they repaired the problem

It was dreadful having your site down so often, many support emails came through to me, much more than I cared to have and was a huge waste of my time.

Moral: If your server is struggling they can move you to another box. dont be afraid to ask

Gridhost (shared hosting)

They decided to take down a server one of my clients systems were on. They did not warn us.

They upgraded the php, mysql. They changed IP addresses. They left the old server on, running scheduled tasks on old data, that we could not see or do anything about.

Their reply was "oh yeah, the old one is still running. Should we switch it off?".  (we never knew there was an old or a new one)

The result of their no warning, was actually rather grave.

• SMS's were being duplicated, sent by two different servers.
• one of the sms's was being sent at 3am much to the 500 customers complaints
• the reminder sms's were being sent everyday, because the data was not being updated (old server, we had no access to it)
• Emails were not being delivered as the email route was changed
• FTP scanned documents (around 200 documents) had to be rescanned and uploaded.
• and lots more losses I cannot really reveal but some with more effect.

Moral: Dont expect others to treat your systems as you do. They might just not care about downtime in the same way. At some point you need to own the whole thing, rather than have it in the hands of others. 

We all expect things to go wrong every so often and I can take many things in my stride, but the lack of apology and lack of care from gridhost was really evident and frustrating.

After 22 domains, and managing various customer domains around the world, I have noticed s.a hosting to be down most often. I have two serious questions

• Does S.A hosting take uptime as seriously as elsewhere in the world?
• Do we have a lack of skills in the customer/ technician areas at our hosting companies?