We’d like to have a geeky post about the past week of website drama should anyone out there be in the market for a webhosting provider.

On November 30, 2009 our now former webhosting provider, Bluehost, essentially crashed and burned on us.  It was strike three for us and we needed to get out of there ASAP. 

Strike 1:  Earlier this year a random reader submitted an article of ours to Fark.com which caused tens of thousands of people to try and access our website at about the very same time.  This caused the server to crash.  Instead of just saying that we overloaded the shared server that we were on and having that be that, they rudely claimed that something was wrong with our SQL database (nothing was) and rudely informed us that we shouldn’t have allowed ourselves to be Farked. 

Yes, they essentially informed us that we shouldn’t have provided an interesting story for people to read.

Strike 2: About a month later we noticed entire galleries of photos were missing.  Not only was Bluehost unable to restore said files, but they caused more galleries to go missing while trying to fix the issue, they also left the gallery page open for anyone to gain admin access to it and they never figured out the reasons behind that mystery or the mystery of the vanishing photo galleries. 

The last we heard about the ordeal was from a Level III tech who said that he had no clue what had happened and that a developer would get in touch with us.  We never heard from a developer and were hoping to get through the rest of our contract without any more hiccups.

Now you might say, Beehive, it is your responsibility to have a back up of your website so that the webhost can restore your site.  True, we should always have a good back up, but Bluehost never allowed us access to a true back up of our website.  We would only be given the opportunity to download a two or three week old (at best) version of the website — essentially back ups that were so old that it wasn’t even a true version of our site — other times we weren’t even allowed access to an old version to download.

Strike 3:Around mid-morning on the 30th we noticed BeehiveHairdresser was down, called up Bluehost customer service, were told that a Bluehost admin was doing server maintenance and that things should be back up in about 30 minutes.

30 minutes later we called again to see what had happened and to find out an ETA on the server.  Bluehost informed us that nothing was wrong with our site, that a Bluehost admin was investigating server performance problems and gave us a new ETA of 15 to 45 minutes for the server to be back to normal. 

90 minutes after that, and two hours after the original call we saw that BeehiveHairdresser.com was back, but it was full of errors and had content from July 2008 as the most up to date. 

We called to see what was up and were told that everything had been fixed when it clearly wasn’t. 

When informed that things hadn’t been fixed Bluehost pulled the old “It’s your job to back up your site.  Since you don’t have a back up, we can’t help you” line.  They even said that they didn’t have any back up tapes from their data center for us to work off of — this just floored us beyond belief.

We informed them that we didn’t have a back up of the site due to Bluehost not providing us with a way of getting a true back up and how at that moment in time we didn’t even have access to any old version of the website to download.  We were again told that all was well and back to normal when clearly nothing about Bluehost or the live version of BeehiveHairdresser was well; we were also told that they had no better back up of our website other than the July 2008 one and they were in agreement with us in that we were up a sh!t creek as far as having access to any of our files from the last three and a half years. 

Given all of this, in our humble opinion: Bluehost sucks.

We immediately called our credit card company to begin the process of having our Bluehost webhosting charges reversed and then began looking for a new webhost. 

We decided to go with one of the largest webhost providers around, GoDaddy — this didn’t bode well for us. 

During the sales call all of our questions were met and we were told that should we get access to our files from Bluehost that GoDaddy techs would help us every step of the way to ensure that we had everything set up properly on GoDaddy servers. 

GoDaddy set us up on a server, we uploaded a new version of WordPress and during this time Bluehost magically manafound an up to date copy of BeehiveHairdresser from the morning and did a full restore to it.  Not only that, but Bluehost also gave us an option to get a real time back up — something that we never had before. 

That’s when things got hazy with GoDaddy. 

While the customer support reps from GoDaddy were all courteous and professional (with the exception to one) we were never able to upload/transfer/migrate, whatever you want to call it…all three and a half years of content from BlueHost to GoDaddy.  We got things to the GoDaddy server, but never were were able to have those things actually work on a Preview DNS of the site or on a live version of our site through GoDaddy.

We tried three or four different ways and actually spent 12 hours of Tuesday the 1st uploading a massive file to GoDaddy servers only to learn that said type of file could never be read by GoDaddy servers.  We estimate that we spoke with about 25 techs and they all had a different way of doing things, none of which got the job done. 

Eventually it got to a point on Friday afternoon when we were given yet another version of how the upload/transfer/migration should be done and had had enough.  We politely asked for a refund and they politely gave it to us.

While we’re not about to say that GoDaddy sucks, they certainly wasted a week of our life. 

All of the GoDaddy techs (with the exception of one) were kind, professional and gave it their best, however, they all informed us that “we’re not allowed to go there” on certain aspects of the website transfer despite being told during the sales call that they could.  Go figure. 

So, that leads us to this week. 

Yesterday we found a new webhost provider (they’re on this list) who has multiple data centers that are about 3,000 miles apart.  They allow us access to back ups and they actually did the move from Bluehost to their servers for us.  That’s right, they moved BeehiveHairdresser from Bluehost to their servers for us – they went where GoDaddy wouldn’t.  It didn’t cost an arm or a leg and instead was just part of their shared webhosting plan that is reasonably priced at $9 a month. 

Our new host has also given us some of the best customer service we’ve ever had from webhost providers and they informed us that should we get too large for our current plan they would work with us to figure out how to clean things up to run more smoothly and if it came to a point of being really too big for a shared server, they could easily move us up to our own full server with plenty of heads up as far as cost and the move itself, etc.