Zen and the importance of web hosting services....

Everything to do with using your own website to advertise your rental property. Design, usability, hosting, getting listed on the search engines, optimising your site, pay-per-click, etc, etc.
Post Reply
User avatar
greenbarn
Posts: 6146
Joined: Sat May 30, 2009 6:41 pm
Location: The Westmorland Dales, Cumbria

Zen and the importance of web hosting services....

Post by greenbarn »

I spent some time considering who I should use for hosting our website and email domain; a lot of the companies look a bit schoolground, it had to be someone with a strong reputation and professional attitude even if it came at a price.
So I chose Zen Internet - winner of various Which awards, Best Provider of the Century etc etc etc.

So it's been a bit frustrating, to say the least, that the server at Zen where our site is (was) hosted went down Wednesday, and is still not up. So no visibility or availability of our website, intermittent (mainly failing) email delivery, and utter indifference from Zen who don't appear to be interested in the little people; presumably the big boys have all sorts of redundancy and backup servers, but the likes of us don't matter. We can go out of business while everyone at Zen goes home for the weekend.

I've now completed the move of our site and email to a new hosting company, WebHostingUK (as mentioned a couple of times on here by e-Richard). Lots of live chat technical support when needed - and it was needed! - but the process still took a couple of days before the newly located site could be found (that's down to the time it takes to propagate a new DNS record around the world. Or something.)

So there's a harsh lesson here - check the terms of service and SLA from your provider, and don't use Zen.

Zen are also my ISP - time for a change there methinks, particularly as they are about to raise their prices for non-fibre services (that's us) to rip-off levels.

Just when you thought you'd covered most of the possibilities for everything going t!ts up, along come another one. :evil: :evil:
Top
Hells Bells
Posts: 13173
Joined: Sat Apr 30, 2005 8:42 am
Location: French Alps
Contact:
Contact Hells Bells

Post by Hells Bells »

GB, I use Webhosting UK too. They've always been very helpful when there has been a problem even if it was of my own making.
Top
User avatar
kevsboredagain
Posts: 3207
Joined: Sat Jan 20, 2007 9:32 am
Location: France
Contact:
Contact kevsboredagain

Post by kevsboredagain »

They may have backups and redundancy to cover their own problems but worth making sure you cover your own. ie. have your own website contents backup plan in operation.
Top
User avatar
greenbarn
Posts: 6146
Joined: Sat May 30, 2009 6:41 pm
Location: The Westmorland Dales, Cumbria

Post by greenbarn »

kevsboredagain wrote:They may have backups and redundancy to cover their own problems but worth making sure you cover your own. ie. have your own website contents backup plan in operation.
Good advice. I backup my WP site to BlogVault which is completely independent of the hosting site; they were extremely useful in migrating my site developed on my desktop to the host server in the first place (a non-trivial exercise with a wordpress site - at least it was for me) and have a daily backup from the host server to theirs. Without that, I might have really struggled to migrate my site onto a different hosting service while Zen were out partying.
I've also restored a previous day's backup when something went belly up during an upgrade of a theme or plugin or something - can't remember - which got my site back working within a few minutes while I came down off the ceiling and thought calmly about what might have gone wrong. BlogVault enable you to do a test restore of your site backup on their own server to check it's okay - handy before you restore it onto your live site!

I think it was the possibility of having my site subjected to some sort of malicious attack that prompted me to go for a backup service in the first place; I've not had to use it to recover from an attack, but I've been very glad of it nonetheless.

ps - I just checked the server on Zen again and it's still having problems :roll: I really thought I'd made a wise decision when I chose them......
Top
User avatar
Nemo
Posts: 7062
Joined: Thu Aug 14, 2008 10:15 am
Location: Norfolk

Post by Nemo »

Sorry to hear this, but it looks like you're emerging from the other side ok. :)

I use tsohosting who have good support, reliable servers plus back ups I believe; my only grumble was they took my site offline without telling me when I had a sustained hacking attempt. I think I woke up to 600 emails from my security plug in. :shock:
Top
stork
Posts: 332
Joined: Fri Jan 07, 2011 3:18 pm
Location: Algarve
Contact:
Contact stork

Post by stork »

We are using unoeuro. com - the price refers to the monthly charge (ex VAT). Have been happy with them so far; support has been fast and I have during the last 8 years only discovered I was without email for about 4 hours AFAIR.

But yeah, I better make sure my backup is working :-)
Top
Vince
Posts: 112
Joined: Tue Jul 01, 2014 10:11 am
Location: Javea, Spain

Post by Vince »

Another host to try is http://www.unitedhosting.co.uk who I've been with now for 8 years.

Nothing short of excellent.
Top
Post Reply

Return to “Personal websites”