Today, without really telling them yet, I have dumped one of my hosting companies!

There's a reason why I work with a number of companies, not just one to be hostage to.

Out of the blue, one site got banned.

I receive one of this standard e-mails, you site has been suspended ... yipee, but can you tell me why?

3 emails back to support and nothing.

I leave it alone ... for like 10 hours, then one snippy support technical superior clog tells me that the person in charge of that dept will not be in for another 3 more hours and he can't tell me what the problem is and then he tells me not write about this anymore >!>!??!>@???/

huh ... excuse me?

I wrote 3 times to provide information on the case, not like they care.

What really really really happened ...

The site in question was submitted to StumbleUpon and guess what, it EXPLODED with traffic.

Gee, finally I was getting TONS OF TRAFFIC, but could not monetize from it (i.e., make money from it!) because my site was suspended.

Holding me back from the bucks = not good.

In the end, the site was re-instated over 12 hours later without any compassion (not like I'll ever get it) or any explanation.

Hosting company owners take notice

The economy as such is not in a great situation and as such, try to keep your existing customers, no matter what they pay monthly. Work in increasing your response time and simply let the customer know that you are aware of the problem and are working on it or something. No one like to be left in the dark.

Some of you may have issues generating new customers, but keeping the existing ones is what pays for the trips to Europe, the parties in Montreal and the 3 hour lunches on top of keeping your skilled technical support personas gainfully employed so they can look forward to another day of happy customers.

In this market, due to our open market, there are choices not like in some countries where you only get two brands of state issued toothpaste.

Have I found a replacement?

You bet. They even answered by call, answered my questions, etc ...

And in this new online social networking market, businesses can benefit, because one person tells another person and another person tell another and ...

The Planet is a dedicated server hosting provider which operates six large data centers in Texas. One of their Houston-based data centers suffered from a fire last night which has left all servers there temporarily down which means that approximately 7,500 customers can’t access their websites.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Data-Center-Fire-at-The-Planet-Disrupts-Popular-Blogging-Service-94904

Follow up on post:

http://antonjamm.blogspot.com/2008/05/planet-goes-down.html

Seems from DP and others, many are still in the dark

ETA - today - 50%

Today turned to be a brutal day in web hosting.

Tonight at 5:45 p.m. in Houston, Texas, a transformer in The Planet H1 datacenter caught fire. The fire department required them to take down all generators.

http://newsblaze.com/story/20080531221432nnnn.nb/newsblaze/TOPSTORY/Top-Stories.html

When should affected customers be back online?

When NewsBlaze asked, they said "According to the last update, power should be restored in the data center tomorrow afternoon."

Who is affected?

Many domain names, websites and reseller accounts. One of their top resellers, Hostgator is down with customers left in the lurch

http://forums.hostgator.com/showthread.php?t=33498

Talk on DP forums

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=7982894

Hopefully this all resolves soon.

The Web Host Industry review recently came out with their 1st annual "Hottest Hosts" publication back in January (wow - it's already March!!!) titled 'Web hosting and hosted services buyer's guide'.

Various categories including Small Business hosting, Unix/Linx, database, enterprise, ecommerce and more.

What I found surprising was some of the host providers I work with that are not mentioned or included in the publication. It's not like these companies do not have an advertising budget or thrift on PPC ad campaigns.

For small business hosting needs, there are always options and you do not have to work locally, as one client recently thought they had to do. Host providers throughout USA and Canada are abundant, quality of service and level of support will always vary.

A steal for small business hosting:

A new promotion that recently came up offers
a whopping 10GB of server space,
300GB of monthly transfer (bandwidth),
500 email accounts (ok, I'll set those up right away!)
and 10 MySQL database (very sufficient for most business needs).

Best of all, plans start from $3.65 to $4.29 a month - a no brainer for a simple 5-5000 page website!

View more about this Web Hosting Special here ...

Who would have thought that web hosting prices have gotten so cheap? I remember the days of having to pay for a set-up fee, then there's a monthly charge and yes ... watch your bandwidth because you'll be charged extra!!!

No more, web hosting has become very competitive.

Here's a great deal for cheap web hosting

• 100 GB of server space - great if you are hosting a photography website that takes up a lot of space from images or videos
• 1,000 email accounts - what for this?
• Monthly bandwidth transfers of 1000 GB per month - wow!
• Unlimited sub-domains - can you imagine the search engine (SEO) potential here. Each sub-domain is viewed as a seperate domain in the search engine eyes
• PHP, MySQL database, web stats and more

Best of all, PayPal is accepted. So if you have money just sitting there, what do you have to lose?
Check out this cheap web hosting deal here ...

Personally, I'm familiar with this system and the web hosting services are rock solid!