Site Moved

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(If you’re reading this, then you’re on the new site. Congratulations. 😉 )

After hosting my websites with Total Choice Hosting (TCH from here on) for more than eight years, I’ve been forced to move them. The issue: lost e-mails.

A few months ago, a friend of mine called to ask if I’d gotten his e-mails. I hadn’t. When we ran some tests, his e-mails got through to me with no problem, so I dismissed it as a fluke.

Last week, one of the developers I work with asked me about a case that he’d assigned me the day before. The company’s case management software normally sends me an e-mail notification when a case is assigned to me. We tested it, and none of its notification messages are getting through.

I went through TCH’s ticket system, but after a week, the problem still wasn’t resolved. Worse, I discovered that messages from the billing company I use weren’t getting through either. I was already late on one bill payment because of that, so now I owed a late fee in addition to the time I’d already lost to this problem.

I’ve been relatively happy with TCH for all this time, and I realize that e-mail problems are notoriously difficult to troubleshoot, but an e-mail account that can’t receive messages is useless to me. I would rather have hundreds of spam messages get through than have one valid message blocked.

TCH will fix the problem eventually, and once they do I’ll be happy to recommend them again, but I can’t wait for them any longer. I spent this morning moving the site to its new host, and now I’m just be waiting for the DNS records to be updated (which should be done in a couple days). I may come back to TCH in the future, because for the most part I’ve had very good experiences with them, but for now I’m outta here.

6 Comments

  1. Testing, testing… looks like comments work again now. 🙂 Thanks for letting me know, Ploni.

    So far, the transition has gone pretty smoothly. The new site’s e-mail servers are NOTICEABLY faster; the site has its own unshared IP address, SSH access (which TCH steadfastly refused to allow for the entire time I was with them), and I’ll be adding a private SSL certificate soon too (which was cost-prohibitive on TCH).

    Of course, the new site costs nearly three times as much as the old one as well. I could have gone with a lesser plan at the new hosting company (and gotten an even lower price than at TCH), but I wanted the extras that this one offered, and the cost isn’t that much even now.

  2. Maybe they’ve improved since I last dealt with them eight years ago but I remember a time when they were upgrading their servers. We had a pretty active forum at the time and had shut it down on the day our site was to be moved so that we’d not loose any messages. To our surprise and annoyance, instead of transfering current data from the old server to the new server they instead did a restore from a backup that was at least a day old to set up the new server, so not only was the forum back online as it was when the backup was made, we lost all the messages that had been posted since the backup made. And we weren’t the only ones, their TCH’s forums were full of complaints about lost data because of the way TCH did the upgrades, as I recall several even packed up their sites and left TCH. Since it wasn’t my decision who we hosted with, I simply stopped recommending them.

  3. Everyone’s entitled to one mistake. 🙂 I think I had a couple other problems with their systems over the years, but for nearly a decade of hosting, that’s a pretty damn good track record. In researching hosting companies to move to, I saw a lot of horror stories about other hosting companies that made me glad TCH is as good as it is.

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