Mine Host
I looked up the official definition of host today as my understanding of the word seems to be way off beam. Here’s what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say on the subject…
noun
1 a person who receives or entertains guests.
2 the presenter of a television or radio programme.
3 a person, place, or organization that holds and organizes an event to which others are invited.
4 often humorous the landlord or landlady of a pub: mine host raised his glass.
5 Biology an animal or plant on or in which a parasite lives.
6 the recipient of transplanted tissue or a transplanted organ. OED
Now when I pay someone to look after my sites I rather expect them to conform to number 1 - a person who receives or entertains guests. However, after recent events I’m beginning to feel like number 5 - an animal or plant on or in which a parasite lives.
I won’t go into the whole sorry story which drags on and on, and I must point out that it’s not the host for this site who have been exemplary, but the support people at ‘the other host’ beggar belief at times.
They seem to be staffed by 14 year old boys who are supremely confident in their own skills when they actually know nothing and care less. One of them in particular only has to type his name in response to a support ticket and my heart sinks as I know I’m in it for the long haul. He seems incapable of reading the entire message before replying. Speed is definitely his forte as I get answers back very quickly but they have absolutely nothing to do with what I asked. It takes several goes at sending the same message, modified each time with relevant bits he’s ignored in bold, before the penny finally drops.
Now this is not a cheap host. For the first 3 years I was with them they were fantastic, then they sold out to a new owner. Things have gone a bit pear shaped which is a real shame as their package is great, servers fast and facilities second to none which is why I’m loathe to move everything.
Contrast this with the host for this site. Cheap as chips, as a well known presenter says. Service is great, support was lightning fast on the one occasion I needed it and (touches wood) drama free hosting.
People often say “you pay for what you get”. Clearly not.
The latest trouble which has caused me hours of hassle is PHP related. I know exactly what the problem is and what needs to be done to fix it but super support boy is convinced it’s my coding that’s at fault, despite the fact that the site has been sitting there happily for 4 years. In an attempt to prove to me that it’s my fault, he’s gone in and modified the code in my index page, then proudly told me to go and see that he’s fixed the error. He’s taken a page that cleared Cynthia and done this:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/3colayout.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/3colstyle.css" />
<body>
<div style="position:relative">
< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
</div>
</body>
<div id="container">
Ooooh Yeah! That’ll work. Sigh.
Min responds:
Posted: December 18th, 2007 at 3:50 pm →
I hear ya! Same host by the look of it. 48 hours and counting. I was asked to rename all my html pages to .php. No problem, I don’t mind losing my number one Google rank, no siree.
Jaybee responds:
Posted: December 18th, 2007 at 3:56 pm →
Mmmmm may well be the same host. I was asked to do the same. My answer was probably very similar to yours.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: December 18th, 2007 at 8:09 pm →
Time to shove a hedge hog up his…. never mind, I’m being crude. My heart goes out to you Gill. I own a web hosting company (and we don’t treat our customers as parasites), but we don’t own our own servers or facility. We lease. Thus we are still at the mercy of those upstream so to speak. We had one before the one we have now and they were terrible. Tons of downtime, and a lot of run-around if we needed anything. And what irritated us was we never knew who we were talking to so no relationships could be established. Every person that worked there had a support username (not a real name) that was a variation of the facility’s name, e.g, CrappyServersRUs. crappyserversrus, crappy-server-r-us, so on a so forth. That was annoying. We wanted to establish relationships with these people and be able to talk to these people but noooo. We later learned they were full of more crap than we first thought, but that’s a story for another day.
Welcome back stranger.
Jaybee responds:
Posted: December 19th, 2007 at 2:21 am →
Thanks Mike
I wouldn’t waste a good Hedgehog on him. I have the same name problem. I’ll get a reply from (name changed to protect the
guiltystupididiotic) MarkH but I could swear that 5 minutes later I’m talking to a completely different person, either that or he has the memory span of a gnat. When you’ve been dealing with someone on live support for the past two hours for them to then ask what the domain name is……Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: December 19th, 2007 at 8:06 pm →
@Min: You should add an .htaccess file to your domain with 301 redirects, changing your *.html file names to *.php so that you won’t lose rank. That said, your host should be able to set up the server to run PHP on HTML pages. That said, again, why it’d be mandated by the host is utterly ridiculous. I mean if you have an HTML page that isn’t running PHP scripting, why on earth would they require such a change. My advice: Since you’re about to go through a change, find a new host. One move, double the benefit.
Jaybee responds:
Posted: December 21st, 2007 at 3:07 am →
Ahh Mike if only you knew. If Min is on the same host as I am, that’s precisely the problem.
I use htaccess to parse all my html pages as PHP as I use PHP includes for the borders, nav etc. Been working fine for years then all of a sudden, no borders. The PHP includes stopped working. I went in to check what was going on and the AddHandler for Apache in htaccess had been commented out.
Removed the comment and all was OK until the next morning when it was back again. I removed it. Next day the same thing but this time removing it made no difference. That’s the long story as mentioned above. They installed PHP5 alongside PHP4 and borked something in the process.
Yesterday, they finally went back to the old set up of PHP4 but this morning the comment was back again. I took it out and fired off another support message - “close but no cigar”.
They are running something once a day that is going in and adding this darn comment and they don’t seem to have a clue what it is.