My Painful Experience with a Web Hosting Service

I want to share my experience and thoughts about having a website on a shared hosting account.

Several years ago I was looking for a hosting service to set up a website for my business.  At the time there was already a large number of companies to choose from.  I didn't do any real research.  I just chose one of the first ones I came across.  The name of the hosting company is Action Web Hosting, and I've stayed with them for a long time because I've experienced really great uptime with my site.  I learned later that Action Web Hosting is a reseller for GoDaddy, meaning the computers running websites are run by GoDaddy.

Another thing that kept me with Action Web Hosting was their 24/7 phone support.  I've never experienced any bad wait times.  However, not all has been rosy. In the last couple of years I've experienced frustration getting technical issues resolved.

My most recent incident began on August 4, 2015.  On that date I received a preformatted email from Action Web Hosting congratulating me on an update to my hosting account.  The email indicated that I had a new server for my website and I could start using it.  I had never requested a change to my service, and had never received a heads-up from them that any change was going to happen.  Nervously, I checked my site to be sure it was still showing up.  I discovered that pages that connect to a database on the site could no longer connect to it.  I immediately called customer support.  The rep informed me that my site had been moved to a new server because the one it was on was now too old and unsupported.  The rep had no idea how to correct the database problem, so she conferred with someone else.  I was then advised to try making a change in the connection information on my pages.  The suggested change had no effect, so the rep escalated the ticket.

As of August 14, 2015, the issue was still unresolved. On August 10 I received an email from customer support stating the issue was resolved.  But it wasn't, so I contacted customer support again on August 11.  I was told the problem was still being addressed and I should get a resolution in about three hours.  On August 15, when the issue remained, I once again called customer support.  The rep told me to try deleting my database and then recreating it.  He acted as though this wasn't really his problem, and I got the impression from his attitude that I was wasting technicians' time working on a problem they couldn't figure out.  The rep claimed I was the only customer experiencing this issue.  Finally, on August 15 I gave up and tried deleting the database and replacing it with a new one.  After I did that the connection worked for the new database.

Understandably, I started looking for another hosting service.  As I said before, this wasn't the only issue I had experienced with customer support, but I don't have time to go into those issues now.  I can say that I know a little something about website technology because I'm a database developer who has created web pages and was the one who set up my business site and database.  When I contact customer support I often feel as though I'm talking to an idiot.  But that's a harsh judgment. Customer support reps don't have the resources at hand to address these issues quickly, and they are not technicians - they're more like customer relations people.

In researching other hosting services I've found lists of recommended ones based on number of customer complaints vs. praises.  My experience with Action Web Hosting (GoDaddy) and my research into other hosting options have left me with the following thoughts.

First - no matter how highly ranked a web hoster is, you can find customer complaints about support.  Plenty of diatribes can be found related to broken sites caused by the hoster and the frustration of dealing with clueless customer support reps.  In addition to my own problems, I've witnessed a couple of my web developer colleagues' struggling with incompetent support reps when their clients' sites ran into trouble.  One client's site was down for at least two weeks.  They finally moved to another hoster. The troublesome web hoster was IX Web Hosting, by the way.

Second - customer support is not really technical support.  When you contact support you're probably just getting a customer-relations-and-sales rep.  These people are cut off from the technicians, or have poor communications with them.  With Action Web Hosting, it's as if the support reps are even more in the dark about the situation than I am.

Third - things are great only when things don't go wrong.  When things do go wrong, and the fault is on the hoster's end, the support reps want to blame you for any issue you report.  They like to suggest that you've done something incorrect in a configuration or script file, when in fact there's nothing incorrect and the site was working for months without a glitch with the same configuration and scripts.  It can be nearly impossible to get though to anybody there that there's a problem with the server they need to troubleshoot.

So I've decided on this course of action:

I'm going to look for another hosting company which is high on the ranking lists, and is not a reseller.  Then I'm going to copy my website onto the new hosting account.  I'm not going to end my account with Action Web Hosting.  That's because I intend to maintain two duplicate websites in case one runs into trouble, and because the GoDaddy servers do indeed stay up and running most of the time.  Finally, I'm going to set up a failover service that will redirect traffic to one of my duplicate sites whenever the other one encounters a problem.

In summary, my solution is to use redundancy.  I'm going to assume that sooner or later a hosting service will fail me, no matter how high its ranking or how reliable it's been for me in the past.  Fortunately my site's issue with my database was not a critical one this time.  But I want to ensure future glitches won't hurt my business when my site's uninterrupted functionality is critical.