As many of you know, I switched from a shared host that was I very happy with (BlueHost.com if you care) to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) so that I could run Web Edition apps (without fear of getting booted off for an app that took down an entire server) and get more speed from my website. After 3 or 4 people were streaming videos the whole site become practically unusable and that’s the big drawback of using a shared web host – your server might have a thousand websites all clamoring for server processor attention at any given time. So I switched.
I did my research and looked around and got recommendations. I was settled on one and called and they called back a day later. That was no good. I called choice #2 and after a single, disastrous phone call with their tech support I decided to go to choice #3 which was MyHosting.com for their VPS package. I went with them because I called tech support and got a real human being who was very helpful (and answered the question correctly). So I went with them.
Unfortunately, since then I’ve had horrible tech support. It took two weeks of tech support to resolve an issue with ordering (yes, just ordering) an SSL certificate. It’s taken three weeks of going back and forth for them to acknowledge that the mail server wasn’t working right (this is after a very long-time client had emails bounce). The latest round has taken over week of getting Spam Assassin installed on the server (again some ordering/billing issue) and the damn thing doesn’t even work. I had one issue early on where the technician actually gave me the wrong instructions and caused my entire domain to be unavailable over a weekend. So collectively I’ve had a very bad experience.
I should have learned my lesson years ago. I used MyHosting at one point for my shared hosting. Again, friendly, very polite people, but their tech support just wasn’t very good and I was spending too much time worrying and fretting over my website.
So I’m on the hunt again for a good, friendly, and useful VPS. I don’t have the time to muck around with my web server for days on end as I have with MyHosting – I have a business to attend to. At this point, I’d ideally love for someone to just switch all three of my domains over to their system and just “get ‘er done” if you’ll pardon the colloquialism.
So I’m looking for recommendations. Don’t recommend one unless you have are absolutely thrilled with them. Price is always an issue but frankly I just want the damn thing to work and if I do have a problem I want to call and be able to talk to a human being that knows the subject material rather than reading from a script. The reason I mentioned BlueHost above is that I loved their shared hosting AND their tech support was always helpful – always. And I used them for five separate websites (and still use them). Too bad they don’t do VPS. 🙁