Bumps in the road....

[Tom]

Some of you may have noticed over the past few weeks that the forum (and queststudios.com) has suffered intermittent down times; usually only for a few minutes, but several times throughout the day.  Since moving to our new host (hostnine.com), things haven't been stable, to say the least.  Hostnine uses several servers (they call them, 'nodes') that are placed all over the world, and some work better than others.  A couple have been under attack, as well.  We have the option to 'migrate' our accounts from one node to another (takes a couple of hours to do this), and I've moved queststudios.com three times so far.  The first server was attacked and unstable, so I migrated to a server in Illinois.  That server was down at least four times a day, for a couple of minutes each time.  It was a pain in the butt.  Now I've moved to a server in Virginia (where Dianne has been for a couple of weeks without problems), and so far, all seems stable.  This is my final attempt with this company before moving to a new host.  Hostnine is only a little over a year old and I don't think their techs are all that savvy in the field.  All the issues we've required tech support to handle thus far were ultimately resolved by us -- it's like they're not aware of how do deal with things like "email bombs" and "firewalls".  (They don't use hardware firewalls, which makes me a bit nervous, too.)

Each 'node' I move to supports different features, too.  I see that the Spell Check feature for the SMF forum is now gone.  Bummer. 

Anyway, I would appreciate your contacting me should you notice any problems while accessing the website.  Sorry for all this moving around and downtime; I think we're finally stable...sort of. 

[Alistair]

Just briefly, you should talk to Colin, who runs the SQ7 project and hosts my site- whoever hosts it (I forget who it is) is great.

- Alistair

[Ari]

Some of you may have noticed over the past few weeks that the forum (and queststudios.com) has suffered intermittent down times; usually only for a few minutes, but several times throughout the day.  Since moving to our new host (hostnine.com), things haven't been stable, to say the least.  Hostnine uses several servers (they call them, 'nodes') that are placed all over the world, and some work better than others.  A couple have been under attack, as well.  We have the option to 'migrate' our accounts from one node to another (takes a couple of hours to do this), and I've moved queststudios.com three times so far.  The first server was attacked and unstable, so I migrated to a server in Illinois.  That server was down at least four times a day, for a couple of minutes each time.  It was a pain in the butt.  Now I've moved to a server in Virginia (where Dianne has been for a couple of weeks without problems), and so far, all seems stable.  This is my final attempt with this company before moving to a new host.  Hostnine is only a little over a year old and I don't think their techs are all that savvy in the field.  All the issues we've required tech support to handle thus far were ultimately resolved by us -- it's like they're not aware of how do deal with things like "email bombs" and "firewalls".  (They don't use hardware firewalls, which makes me a bit nervous, too.)

Each 'node' I move to supports different features, too.  I see that the Spell Check feature for the SMF forum is now gone.  Bummer. 

Anyway, I would appreciate your contacting me should you notice any problems while accessing the website.  Sorry for all this moving around and downtime; I think we're finally stable...sort of. 

Some bad luck you have with hosts, Tom. I hope this one works out this time.
As for the 'spell checker', Anyone using Firefox with it's built-in spell checker, doesn't really need it, as you probably know, so for me at least, it's no big loss.

[Tom]

Some bad luck you have with hosts, Tom. I hope this one works out this time.
As for the 'spell checker', Anyone using Firefox with it's built-in spell checker, doesn't really need it, as you probably know, so for me at least, it's no big loss.

Yeah....I thought it was too good to be true -- that this would be our last hosting service.  Several of Dianne's websites have been down for days, and this is just too much crap to deal with with a hosting service.  So, here we go yet again!!!!!!!

We've avoided using "HostGator" in the past because of problems we've heard about a long time ago.  But these days, they seem to have a proven track record and are highly rated.  Dianne's already setup a new account with them and is having all of our domains moved there.  I'm getting dizzy with all these moves!  When everything's in place, I'll update the Name Servers for QuestStudios.com.  But I'm not doing anything just yet and will post when I do.  Probably next week or so.

[Marten]

Tom,

Y'know, you could always ask for suggestions.   Some of us either have used hosting services ourselves or have friends who have.

[Tom]

I was going to post here and ask for suggestions, even though every hosting service we've used to date has been based on a 'suggestion' from someone.  But Dianne went ahead and made the change on her own, so I didn't have a chance. I think she made the right choise with HostGator, though. 

There's basic criteria she looks for in a host, too: 
Price, server space, WHM and cPanel support, number of MySQL databases allowed.  WHM is most important to her, since she controls six domains, and she's used to how WHM works.