Yikes! I Spoke Too Soon!

I previously noted that I was outgrowing shared hosting and I migrated to a VPS account with VPSLAND. 

I spoke too soon.  Their prices are the lowest for a reason.

VPSLAND’s support was good for the first 24–hours, but after that they neglected me.  I opened a critical ticket because my sites (including this blog) were down for over an hour.  I eventually fixed it on my own by some strange combination of disabling services and rebooting the server 3 or 4 times.  6 hours later a tech chimes in and says “we checked your sites and everything is fine!”  — yeah, great help.

I inquire as to why the system won’t even serve up an empty subtext application and they told me that I should upgrade to a 1GB RAM plan (from 512mb).  I figured I’d need it eventually, so I obliged.  It took them 12 hours to respond to my request.  Meanwhile, one of my sites was acting sluggish and I couldn’t get my friend’s blog started b/c subtext kept timing out.

The next morning they told me my server was upgraded and everything was fine.  But it wasn’t.  I was seeing the same sluggish behavior and subtext was continually timing out (at the database level — but remember, this is an empty database).  This time I know it’s not RAM because I have 700 freakin megabytes free.

I eventually broke down and got a VPS plan at godaddy (512MB ram) for $37/month.  It’s a little more money, but they set it up in about 45 minutes and it’s worked flawlessly so far!

I also want to apologize to a certain reader who decided to go with VPSLAND after reading my post.  He is also having troubles with them and I wish I had not posted such a glowing review so quickly after signing up.  VPSLAND refunded my payment, so hopefully if you still have problems you can do the same.

Anyway, I will say that so far godaddy’s plan is good, but I will not give them my Seal of Approval (TM) until I’ve used it for a couple months.

(if you noticed the downtime, I apologize!)