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!)