Hosting Woes

Complacency. This is generally why we don't always really try improving our lives, why we continue keeping inept people in office, and why we still continue paying for and using products, goods and services we know are inferior, substandard and useless. Take my former web host, Aplus.net.

I had developed some amount of loyalty with them in the beginning of this decade, probably a bug CNET planted in my ear when they rated them one of the top hosts back in 1999 or so. They were ok at first, but merely adequate for me over the last few years, then SERIOUSLY dipped in quality within the last year. So what do I do last March when the contract was up, knowing they were not what they used to be, not to mention knowing numerous BBB complaints were filed against them over some shady marketing practices? Hey, sign me up another year! Yes, the morphball can be pretty damned foolish at times.

So. Last month, I'm interested in rolling out my own phpBB3 forum (still in beta as of this writing), and I'm suddenly reminded how shitty my host really is. I tried reasoning with their support, and I get the lazy answer. Y'know. "It's not us, it's anyone else; now kindly bugger off." (They actually said it was because the Drupal CMS I'm using is "improperly configured/ineffective code"... feckin unbelievable.)

To prove just how lame this statement was, I set out to start writing a script that would access my domain, 2 subdomains and an identically-configured Drupal install on my 3.2Ghz/2G SDRAM home computer built in 2003. Soon realizing I probably don't have to recreate the wheel, I found a nice script called "responser" from http://checkwebsite.org/ (I'm not clear on who actually wrote it, but thanks!), that attempts to contact a defined list of addresses, and logs downtime and access time. Simple but exactly what I needed to gather evidence.

On August 1st through August 10th, I scheduled cron on my work computer to run it every 10 minutes. A typical log entry looks like this:

+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                              Time: 14:20:01                                        |
|          HOST                                     STATUS       RESPONSE            |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| http://www.morphzone.net                           DOWN        N/A                 |
| http://forum.morphzone.net                         ACCESSED   Response 14 seconds  |
| http://gallery.morphzone.net                       SLOW       Response 21 seconds  |
| http://myhomecomputer.net                          ACCESSED   Response 0 seconds   |

Seriously. My meager little Linux box on a residential ADSL line is blowing the crap out of my award-winning web provider. The final tally after only 10 days:

http://www.morphzone.net
DOWN: 532
SLOW: 42

http://forum.morphzone.net
DOWN: 254
SLOW: 54

http://gallery.morphzone.net
DOWN: 178
SLOW: 59

My Ubuntu 7.04 PC on a 1.5/300 ADSL line:
DOWN: 0
SLOW: 1

This is no fabrication, folks... A+ .Net would get an F- in my classroom, and might even be held back a grade. I'm attaching the original logs in my letter to the San Diego BBB, if it will be useful at all. Oh, if this wasn't bad enough, they even refused to reimburse me for the rest of the year! I could understand not comping partial months, but partial years? I'm of course still going to harass them some more, but I already know that payment is long gone, and I sure as hell know it wasn't spent on upgrading their equipment or hiring competent tech staff.

Anyway, moral of the story; never become complacent with anything; this is equally true in economics, politics, your career, your life...

I'll be back soon once I find inner peace by touching my inner child or something.