blinder's Journal: When Things Don't Work Part II

so we are moving the solemndragon.org website. they haven't made it easy.

in fact, apart from their absolutely terrible "admin" interface, they simply do not provide tools one would expect to transfer domain names. oh sure, it seems to be easy as pie to transfer a domain *in* to their (crappy) service... but to transfer a domain *out* well, it is probably going to take an act of congress, in fact, since this place is not even in the us, it may take some kind of international treaty to get it done.

i've been fooling around in the web hosting game for a while (over a decade) and i've never come across a company that makes things more painful for a customer to do what needs to get done (and in our case, get the fuck out).

so this move is going to have to be a phased move. first we are changing the host record to point to my server, but then we have to change the registrar in that the hosting company *is* the registrar. ugh.

well, once this is done, the site will be easier to maintain in that it will all be on my dedicated machine and not with a piss-poor-customer-service-with-no-real-admin-tools (shared) hosting company. i knew there was a reason i hated "shared" hosting. blech. oh oh oh and let us *not* forget about the repeated "reminders" that the annual fee was coming up and the knuckleheads didn't bother to submit an invoice for it! so... they really have made it *impossible* to give them money. kind of a weird business model if you ask me.

They ALL suck.

[Deamos]

As I posted in Sol's JE all web hosting companies suck.

I've worked for one, my present employer also does hosting though I stay away from it as much as possible. But they all suck, the only varible is how much they suck.

I like my current host, they were going through a rough patch but have cleaned up quite well as of late, but I know the pain you are going through.

Also I hope you are aware of the no transfer clause when a domain name is within ... I think it's 60 days, you can change host records and even

Re:They ALL suck.

[blinder]

heh... yeah they all do suck. i'm quite satisfied with my provider though... but its a bit different. i actually lease a dedicated machine, and i have full root access... and no one, but me, is on that machine. i use serverbeach, and i've been with them for about three years now. not a single problem, and when i do have issues, i just submit a ticket and they are on it within an hour.

i've even had major problems, like disk failures happen, and they've had me up and running within six hours.

i'm prepared to j

Re:They ALL suck.

[Deamos]

A dedicated machine is the way to go if you can justify the cost for it to be sure. When I moved my sites from where I used to work to the current host I couldn't justify the cost of a dedicated machine.

Still couldn't justify the cost of getting one at the place where I work, but then they allow employees to put up their own colocated machine anyway.

I am *slowly* moving in the direction of getting my colo machine setup so I can move my sites to it.

About serverbeach, I've heard lots of good things about the

Re:They ALL suck.

[bofh31337]

We had a local ISP here back in the 90's who's slogan was something to the tune of "All Internet providers suck....BUT WE SUCK LESS". :)

Interesting

[Tet]

I've never had any problems with transferring domains into or away from them, but then I've mostly been dealing with .uk domains, and Nominet makes that trivial. Customer service has always been their Achilles heel, but recently they've been bought out by $MEGACORP (in this case, Pipex), and everything has deteriorated -- customer service, performance, reliabliity, the whole works. I'm seriously considering moving to another ISP.

The least amount of suck I've seen so far

[rdewald]

For the record, my host, Dreamhost [dreamhost.com], has been making me pretty happy. I just lease disk space and bandwidth, I can host as many domains as I care to, which is good for me because I host a moderately large number of crappy, unsuccessful and virtually ignored websites. They run Debian and give you full access to your diskspace via ssh, their disk architecture makes sense and the web panel does what I need it to do.

I've been using godaddy as a registrar for three years or so. I've found it quite a good idea