Just when I thought i was going to have a lazy weekend, sleeping in and catching up on UFC® 95 SANCHEZ vs STEVENSON with my new fiancé, my web hosting provider has to go and stuff it up …
Our current service provider, <name withheld for the moment>, has had shocking service levels since the beginning of this year. Mysterious outages, conflicting support staff reports, unexplained server configuration changes and slow responses are making me think long and hard about whether we should stay with our current service provider.
Is the current economic recession forcing service providers to replace their previously outsourced Indian support crew with trained monkeys who work for bananas rather than Rupees? Based on the past couple of weeks I wouldn’t be surprised …
All our website service up-times have dropped from an acceptable 99.9% down to a miserable 95.0% … I hear you saying a 5% drop doesn’t really sound all that bad, but it equates to roughly 438 hours (18 days) per year of down-time! Worst of all it seems to happen on the weekends …
What this means for most people is that they will experience a level of frustration when they try to connect to our website/services only to find them offline. Lately users have been faced with the following unfriendly message:
Server Error in ‘/’ Application
Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
Apparently, all our .NET web application versions were reset to v1.1 by someone other than us … I’m pointing the finger at service provider staff, who naturally deny it. Oh and our IIS application pool keeps needing to be manually restarted due to recent “undetermined” reasons. 
What this means for epgStream.net is that we have to keep a constant eye on what our web hosting support are doing, which is in effect periodically double checking them to make sure they don’t make any mistakes.
After complaining quite a bit, I’ve been asked to upgrade our hosting service but to be quite honest the last plan upgrade we were told to upgrade to should have *more* than covered our requirements.
I am not convinced I should upgrade our service plan (again) based on the amount of support staff cloak & dagger I’m experiencing. I’m thinking quite seriously about moving everything offsite to another hosting provider such as GoDaddy.com.
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