Computer Aid blog outage
As many of you will have noticed, the Computer Aid blog (and even the main website) stopped working for a few hours today.
The joys of changing hosting companies.
I was originally with http://www.home-business-host.com/ for over 3 years.
They were great while Computer Aid was small: very helpful, and very reliable.
But over the last few months, it seemed that Computer Aid had outgrown the capacity of the shared hosting.
After a quick look around, I decided that a clustered hosting seemed like an ideal solution, but it was a more expensive solution.
It looks like when it comes to clustered hosting (like with many things in life), it becomes a case of: fast, cheap, reliable … pick any 2.
So I reluctantly went with: netfirms
They were cheap, but I read about many peoples bad experiences with Netfirms (mostly from 2006… so I hoped things had improved since then).
Well, I can’t comment on the speed yet, but as expected, customer support isn’t fast (so I had to really struggle to transfer my blog across.
My forum is still not working (and if me and netfirms cant fix it, then I might just dump it).
It seems that most problems arose from trying to transfer my site in a standard way: copy the files and copy the databases.
This worked to some extent, but it seemed that the .htaccess files I copied caused problems. But removing them didn’t help much either. Many people have complained about netfirms non-standard implementation of apache/.htaccess, I guess I’m another victim.
In the end, I created a blank blog using the netfirms control panel, then imported my original database, THEN copy my gila theme!
Anyway, I apologise for the outage.
I still have many plugins to enable, a forum to resurrect, and a re-installation of aw-stats… Looks like I’ll be busy for a while yet…
I’m very surprised that you had problems with Netfirms. I’ve been using them for years and years for many different sites and I rarely have a problem with them. I also find their customer service to be very good, and appreciate the fact that you can contact someone by phone – every other place I tried had some online ticket thing that you’d wait a day or more to get a response on, then get some canned message and have to reopen the ticket cuz there was no real answer there.
Anyway, I’m not trying to promote Netfirms, just sharing my experience with them – you’re the first person I’ve known who also had their hosting there.
I think the problems are somehow due to a large delay between making certain changes, and the changes actually happening.
EG: At one point, I thought: Ah, good, my blog is working at last… but only the main page was working… viewing individual blog posts gave an error message… but a few hours later, the individual posts were “magically” working again (with no input from me).
Another example was that most changes to .htaccess would stop my site from working (including any 301 redirects from computer-aid.com.au to http://www.computer-aid.com.au). Yet a day or so later, I could use the .htaccess file from my original host, and it worked normally… I guess I I deal with netfirms again, I’ll need to remember to (possibly) allow a few days between changes.