If you have tried to use our site over the last 10 days you may have noticed some problems. It all started when I signed up for hosting with a company called GeekStorage.com. A couple of weeks later the site went down during the night. I received notice from them that they had a hard drive failure and were replacing it. To make a long story short, it took 4 days for them to repair things and restore the data. When it came up there were some problems on their side. Scripts weren’t running clean on Firefox and my PHP pagination was not working right. Knowing that they were overwhelmed and not having any confidence in them I decided to bite the bullet and find another host rather than track down the problems. The company seemed much better at marketing than running servers. I think their marketing to geek ratio was way too high.

So I made the switch to another host. Since PHPLD version 3.3 had just come out I decided to take the full plunge. I was previously using PHPLD 3.06. I started from scratch by installing the new software and template on a new host (P4host.com). I had recently had a custom template made that I wasn’t really using so I decided to use it. It needed to be brought up to version 3.3. I also exported the database and imported it into the new server. Importing can be a pain if you timeout before the import is complete. I looked into hiring someone to do the conversion since the technical side is not my forte. Since the site was not fully functional, I needed it done right away and couldn’t find anyone that could do it.

Once the domain propagated to the new host I got everything running after a couple of tries. Things we looking up until I noticed the dreaded “Hosting has been Suspended” message on the site. I fired off support messages and 12 hours later (at 3AM) I received the following message.

your site was using too much resources so we had to suspend it. A refund will be applied to your account shortly. Thank you and have a nice day.

No warning at all. No email. They just shut it off and told me about it 12 hours later. Something probably set off a warning but they found it easier to turn it off rather than doing an investigation. These guys sell you scads of disk space and bandwidth but don’t want you to use it. And what exactly is “too much resources“?

So I went through the whole process again with a new host. Here I am now. I have learned once again that you can get what you pay for when it comes to hosting.

I also know that customized scripts and mods can greatly complicate the process of upgrading. Time to iron out the rest of the problems.