Web Hosts – Grrr
I’m not a very happy camper right now, thanks to my web host. I suppose it’s my own fault really, for being too cheap. But hey, just you try searching for web hosting providers. Like most aspects of the www, there’s a whole world of misinformation out there.
Right now I’m unhappy because they’re offline. Not just my website, but the whole darn thing is down. Even the DNS servers for their domain are dead. It’s pathetic. It’s almost unbelieveable. I’m wondering if they’ve gone out of business.
I should’ve seen it coming I suppose. I’m only checking the site closely because there’s some weird PHP problem at their end. Assigning an array using array() breaks the script, but using array[] doesn’t. And they’re serving all the jpegs from a certain directory as 32x32 pixel transparent GIFS instead. Why?
I only renewed recently, not that they mailed me a reminder or anything. The site was offline for a couple of days. Then the DNS entry wasn’t renewed, so there was another couple of days offline. Nothing got fixed until I complained. Similar story when I initially signed up – it took a complaint to get my DNS entries in at all, and another one to get the problems fixed.
Like I said, I suppose I should’ve seen it coming. Assuming that everything comes online again sometime, I’ll probably leave things as they are for the rest of the time I’ve bought. But I’m seriously thinking of how to fund a virtual machine or a whole dedicated server – or how to get affordable broadband and reliable power into my house so I can be my own host.
Posted Saturday, November 12, 2005