This unreliable service translates to readers as “500 Internal Server Error” messages, long load times, “Hello, World” postings, and — my favorite — presenting an “install WordPress” option as the home page. This allows anyone on the planet to not only overwrite my version of the software on the system, it gives them access to the entire site! Wonderful!

And clearly unacceptable. While fixing issues on the phone with them went quickly, there were no answers as to causes nor steps that needed to take to prevent problems going forward.When your hosting company’s phone number is on your “favorites” list on your iPhone, your hosting company is a problem.

I had already complained about the reliability and they had moved my sites to a different, not as populated, server. For a time, conditions improved, but then steadily declined as more traffic came online. The server, in a reverse IP search, had almost 1900 sites on it, including K9JY.com.

So last week was a lot of research into hosting companies. My criteria was for reliability of the sites being presented to users, phone support (e-mail support and forum support suck when all your sites are down — like on Christmas Day when all of mine were), and a commitment to not stuff your server with every Tom, Dick and Harry on the planet and call it good.

I think I found a good company to work with that meet this criteria. They are more expensive, but not that much more considering a business is being run here. I moved all of the sites this past Monday. There were the usual couple of hiccups with permissions and a couple minor issues that were resolved by Tuesday morning. Really smooth, by most standards.

You should see some return to normalcy in access. Plus, so far, the site has been operating much faster.

Infrastructure, for all you tech types out there, should be a seamless service that is up and running 100% of the time (save maintenance windows). When you run a global company as Cube Rules, LLC, is, even if it is a small company, we need the reliability so when someone logs in from the United States or Singapore (and they do), the infrastructure will be there to serve them.

We’ll see how this hosting company does. So far, so good. But just like most services, your record is renewed every day so the service needs to work every day.

Sounds just like a job, doesn’t it?

Related posts:

1. K9JY and WriteLog Users Site Down Over Weekend
2. K9JY Hacked!
3. K9JY Moves to Bluehost
4. K9JY Blogroll Updated