I've been hosting seven websites on a budget for several years, now, including this one. I started out hosting these sites from my home -- I had a couple of servers and dedicated IP addresses over SDSL funded by my former consulting company, of which I was one of the owners. Virtually total control (total control over the boxes; not as much control over the line). But a headache.
Being responsible for keeping up the servers and the sites were never what I wanted to spend my time on. We have a flakey power situation at my house. When there's a hint of rain or wind, the power goes down. Something about "old wires across trees" or some other similar excuse is what our electric company would claim. And someone nearby always seemed to manage to crash their car into a pole holding up these lines, also causing an outtage. Not an ideal solution for reliable hosting. My company wasn't about to invest in a generator for me, either, so it was always touch and go -- especially when we went out of town for several days. If the power went out, no one was around to restart the servers when power was restored. So it was either downed sites (and, more importantly, e-mail) for the rest of the trip, or an early return home. I was coming to an impasse.
Well, after I left the old consulting company, turning it over to my former partner, it continued to fund the line (around $250 per month). But the reliability problems remained. And just when it was getting where reliability was worsening, and I no longer wanted the responsibility of self-hosting, the company closed up shop, forcing me to find an affordable alternative.
I don't remember where I found the first host I tried -- it may have been a recommendation from a colleague. It was ASPnix. The price was right, and they even allowed me two extra domains (above the standard five). They actually upped my limit to 10. But at only $77.70 per year, something had to give. There were several outtages over the year or so I was with them, but they were fairly responsive at first -- I even had IM access with their main contact, Roma. Roma was very friendly and helpful, so even when they changed their policy for ASP.NET 2.0 sites to medium trust across the board, I stuck with them (and even changed to ThinkJot for my blogs, since dasBlog would not run under less than full trust).
But serious e-mail and server problems a few weeks ago brought my relationship with them to an end. It wasn't so much that there were constant issues where the e-mail server kept going down. That was tough enough. The real problem I, and several other of their customers were having with them was their absolute lack of communication about the issues. I still had some occasional IM contact with Roma, but it was harder to reach him. But there were only rare posts on the site or forums about the issues, and usually very lacking of details. They'd say the "problem was solved", with no explanation or anything. And on top of that, the problem wasn't really solved. The outtages kept happening, more and more, for longer periods of time, and less and less communication. The comments on their forum were getting more derisive all the time, and they still didn't get the importance of customer service.
I finally reached Roma via e-mail and then IM, and he basically claimed that they were struggling with sudden issues with SmarterMail (the popular mail server they use). Basically, they couldn't figure out exactly what the issue was, and implied that they were having trouble contacting the vendor. When I cautioned Roma that they are risk losing customers more over the lack of communication than the technical issues, he stated a common claim that he was so busy trying to solve the issue, that he had no time to communicate about the issues with their customers. Notwithstanding the fact that they definitely had a resource issue on top of everything else, I explained to him a concept I have learned over the years:
Users like progress bars in their software for long running tasks. We are not as concerned that refreshing this progress bar may add a couple of minutes to the total operation. As long as we have an idea of what is happening, and how much longer it should take, we feel in some sort of control. We can decide if we can grab a cup of coffee, go to the store, or buy new software. We may not be thrilled with how long it's taking, but at least we have feedback and can decide what the next plan of action is. We're not left in the dark.
Similarly, we customers like progress indicators from our service providers. We don't mind if it takes a few more minutes to solve the problem, as long as we understand what the problem is, what is being done to try to resolve it, approximately how long it will take, and what steps are being taken to avoid having the same problem in the future. When we're kept in the dark, it is extremely frustrating, and every problem seems worse and seems to take longer to fix. We're ready to jump ship ASAP.
When I explained this point of view to Roma, he seemed to get it. He had recently posted on the forum for the intention for better communications going forward, but had seemed to forget that promise. I was hoping that my analogy helped him see exactly why this was so important. I reminded him that many people were only sticking with ASPnix because they always showed promise for a solid low-cost hosting solution, but that they were still risking mass exodus.
Unfortunately, after an initial limited post about the problem, the next two days were even worse. Communications stopped completely, and Roma was no longer anywhere to be found on IM. I finally had to switch hosting companies, and e-mailed Roma about my cancellation, asking for a full refund (even though the annual fee is normally not refundable) because I had just renewed a couple of weeks prior. To their credit, Roma wrote me back to say that he understood, and they did, in fact, issue me a full refund.
I wish them luck in resolving both their technical and support issues. As I learned at my next hosting company, their problem with SmarterMail was not unique, and neither is their problem with support. I'll talk about that in a future post. In the next post, I'll start to discuss the steps I take when switching web hosting companies.
My Web Hosting Nightmares, Part 2 - Preparing for the Transfer
My Web Hosting Nightmares, Part 3 - Starting With a New Host
My Web Hosting Nightmares, Part 4 - Completing the Transfer
My Web Hosting Nightmares, Part 5 - My Continuing Story