OutskirtsPress.com

Daily Frustration : Website hosting

Our website at OutskirtsPress.com has gone through three major renovations, and beginning this weekend will be hosted by its upteenth hosting company.

This is party due to growth, and partly due to web hosting incompetence. Why is finding a good web host so hard?

I designed the first version of the site in 2000, I think (hell, I can't remember) when Outskirts Press officially went "live" with that moniker. Prior to that, business was conducted through On the Outskirts, my off-shoot web design company. The first version of the site (below) featured many of the elements we still offer today, including a password protected "Author Center" for every one of our writers.

From my web design and hosting days, I was using a company that I liked a lot, and unfortunately, cannot recall the name of right now -- but right as I was launching Outskirts Press, they were bought by another company and their transition was very ugly. Sites were down for days on end, they had zero customer support, and I found the entire ordeal completely unacceptable. I supposed once they recovered from their transition, they would have returned to normal, but the ridiculous way in which they disregarded all elements of customer service vowed me off them forever. It taught me a valuable lesson about customers, though -- they can be fiercly loyal if you treat them right -- and vindictive to a fault if you don't.

So, in despair and desperate to replace my host quickly because my business was booming (ha! -- I didn't even have one book yet), I found some quickie fly-by-night operation who proved immediately that you often get what you pay for. In this case, their sendmail function didn't work with my CGI scripts, and since half my site was built around constant, automatic communication with the author, that was unacceptable.

Later, I discovered many hosting companies were having issues with sendmail because ISPs were shutting down that capability, or blacklisting many hosts, because sendmail was being hacked for aliases and spam. (Excuse me if I don't know the true technical terms for it -- but "pain in my ass" is technical enough).

At any rate, I ended up dealing with that frustration for nearly 6 months anyway, just because switching hosts is such a royal pain. Into the middle of 2003 Outskirts Press had published 10 books or so but the web hosting was still a royal case of annoyance. I started a year long account with NetFirms -- but their customer service sucked, too. My cousin generously offered to give me a great deal on hosting, but his Red-Hat based account experienced the same sendmail difficulties I was trying to avoid, so that didn't pan out, although I greatly appreciated the gesture, and ironically, even now I don't use sendmail via CGI -- but rather, had to teach myself PHP to solve the problem.

I switched to NetInfoLink sometime in 2004, near the beginning I think, but perhaps as long ago as Nov 2003. Right about then, we were switching the site again, with the intention of incorporating some automation and additional features in response to our authors. The template is below.



I liked NetInfoLink because it offered me a Reseller account so I could host not only OP, but also the other websites I was working on for a variety of other clients (including myself). The CPanel has some nice features. By and large, they seemed to be "up" more often than not, and for a while, everything looked good. But, halfway through 2004, the site dropped more than I would have liked and the consistency of the email started becoming suspect. There were times it seemed like we didn't get email and other times when the email flat out stopped working for 24 hours or more. Again, I put up with it longer than I should have because it's a super duper pain to move websites. Especially when they contain dynamic databases that authors can update themselves. Transitioning a live database from one host to another without losing data or causing "downtime" is quite a chess match.

Nevertheless, right about the time we were finishing off the third and final (so far) version of the site (below), I resigned myself to finding a better host - even if it meant spending more money. We were successful enough where a low monthly rate wasn't my top priority. My top priority was now finding a company that I could call during business hours and actually speak with a live human being (a luxury my last three hosts had not afforded).



And now -- today, and this weekend -- this long quest that began nearly 4 years ago is reaching a new milestone, and one that hopefully lasts longer than a year. Knock on wood.