How’s Your Day Going? Mine Sucks!

July 17th, 2008 Chris Posted in Web | 1 Comment »

I had a very bad day on Tuesday. First, I left the house with a dozen eggs on the stove hard-boiling. About 5 hours later I pulled back in and heard a strange whiny sound. Turns out it was the smoke detector going off. I opened the front door only to be greeted by a waft of smoke and a very bad smell.

Luckily, there really wasn’t a fire but I did discover an interesting aspect of eggs – when exposed to high heat, they explode. So our kitchen was coated with a uniform layer of egg guts and I spent the next two hours cleaning shrapnel off the floor, walls and ceiling.

Unfortunately, the worst casualty was our dog Conrad who ended up hiding in the back yard having been traumatized for hours by the alarm and the smoke. I’ve enclosed a picture of him hiding under a bush in our yard, refusing to go back into the smokey, eggy house.

My day took another turn for the worse later later when I was at my Tuesday night track work-out. On the first 1000m interval, I finished and sauntered off the track. Unfortunately, while doing so I rolled my ankle which made a delightful snap. Or at least, so I was told by others as I was too busy rolling around on the ground reciting every curse I could think of.

After fours hours at the hospital, I was happy to hear nothing was broken – just torn ligaments. A month of no running will be a drag but that also means I get to sit back and watch Colleen walk the dog, bring me beer, etc… Not all bad!

My day would have been much worse if I had to be re-creating our blog and member site databases. As I mentioned in my last post, our web hoster had major backup issues and we almost lost a wack of data.

My experience with web hosters has been very checkered. If someone from a micro business was to ask me for advice who to pick to host their site or blog, I would impart the following wisdom (random thoughts?):

First, if you don’t have tens of thousands of visits a month and your site is not transactionally intensive (no climate modelling), a VWS (Virtual Web Server) should be fine. A VWS is where you and other sites share the same server. Thus, you share the load but it’s also very economical (and you really can’t tell that you’re sharing).

When I say economical, no one should be paying more than $10 a month. In fact, we pay under $5 a month. Web hosting has become a pretty much commodity business. But beware! While prices for VWS hosting are pretty standard, the service you get can vary.

For example, my current web hoster is terrible. Hosting Zoom (no link provided because you shouldn’t use them) is a great case study of all the things a hoster can screw up. They have a lot of down time (our site is unavailable for at least an hour or more every month), their service is terrible (they don’t have phone support – everything is via email or chat to India) and as you’ve recently read, they have an unreliable backup process.

Why don’t I switch? Well, three things: 1. I am lazy (or at least we have other thing that more urgently require attention), 2. I have a one year contract with them (i.e. I am cheap) and 3. I just switched from GoDaddy! (who also suck) and there is a fair bit of work to do so (see #1).

But when I do, I likely will be going with Host Monster. I’ve had a personal reference for them plus they routinely appear in reviews as one of the top providers. As a test, I phoned their support line (they have one!) and spoke to a nice gentleman from California who was eager to help me – a refreshing change!

So, in short:

• Don’t put eggs on the stove and then leave the house.
• Watch where you’re going when you’re on the track.
• Don’t pay more than $10 a month for a web hoster but make sure you have a reference for whoever you choose.

C.