For a while now I haven’t been happy with my hosting at Media Temple. I have a Dedicated Virtual (DV) account with them, as well as a Grid Service (GS) account, and host this blog, I’m With The Band, and the Newcastle Coffee Mornings website on it.
Considering that it’s a DV account, and not part of a shared grid, I would’ve thought that it would’ve easily been able to handle the traffic and databases for these couple of sites, but apparently not as I’ve had all sorts of slow loading issues and server problems, and really for the $50 odd I pay per month the support, ie. ‘you’ve got a DV account so you’re on your own’, has been lacking considerably.
Last weekend while surfing around I came across a link on Chris Pearson’s blog where he was promoting midPhase hosting and their ‘Quick Switch’ service. The idea of Quick Switch is that if you bring your hosting over to midpPhase they’ll move all your files to their servers and sort out all the mucking around, coz lets face it the hardest part about moving hosting is stuffing around with databases and files and moving the whole lot and trying to do it without effecting your website too much. I’m thinking this is too good to be true!
Well it is.
Sign up was easy, I filled in the Quick Switch form with all the imwiththeband.com domain details and I thought that would be it.
5 minutes later I receive all my account details, logins, ftp details, etc. so now I can login to my account and do whatever I want. huzzah! this is going well.
Around 2-3 hours later I get an email saying that they can’t do the Quick Switch because my MediaTemple DV account uses a Plesk control panel, and not cpanel. So they suggest I give them the Plesk details and ftp details and also a copy of the database, no problem. I get all that done and a email them off the details, an hour later I get a “Your files and databases have been transferred over. Please let us know if you have any further questions.” email. huzzah! that was awesomely easy, I’m going to recommend these guys to everyone!
Sweet, so I can login to that ‘preview your domain’ link you sent me on signup….no, that actually links to someone else’s website. Ok, so now I’m starting to get a little anxious, but hey no biggie I’m sure it’s something minor but I don’t have the time right now to chase it so I’ll check it out tomorrow……
So now it’s tomorrow, the 24th of November, and I get an email from midPhase billing about renewing my domain name…huh I thought I only host with you. A minute or so later I get an email from some domain name management organisation saying that there’s a request to transfer imwiththeband.com to midPhase, ahh screw it I’m happy enough to move my domain over to them to handle the DNS and all that, it’ll probably be easier in the long run.
I tried again to get onto the preview domain link that midPhase sent me, still resolves to someone else’s website. I’m thinking, ‘surely midPhase have a twitter account, I’ll talk to them’. After finding midPhase on twitter I tweet them and they respond with;
@matpacker “Noticed you were making the move
How’s it going?”
@Midphase not too bad, though can’t see the domain in the ‘preview’ thing, files were all moved by you guys. Will be working on it today..
@matpacker Great, let us know if your domain is not showing up. Can be an easy fix
By now @Midphase has followed me on twitter, so I figure I’ll direct message them, that’ll surely get things moving along.
url is live, http://www.imwiththeband.com but not sure if it’s on your servers or mediatemple. not showing on http://206.217.192.184:2082/imwipac6
and the clock starts ticking away, and away, and away, and away…… 2 days later and still no response.
And now it’s today, 27th of November, and still no response from anyone at midPhase…way to man your twitter account guys. I emailed them this morning, and yes I know it’s about to be Thanksgiving in the US so I’m not expecting a response straight away but still if you say you provide good support you’d want to actually back that up with errrrr good support.
I still struggle to believe that good hosting, and support by domain hosts, is still so hard to come by. I’ve keeping myself familiar with the hosting troubles the guys over at Inquisitr.com have been having, and it appears it almost doesn’t matter how little or how much you spend they’re all the same.
At this point in time I don’t know what to do…and no Square Space isn’t an option.
Anyway I’ll leave you with my final tweet to midPhase this morning;
@Midphase hi, direct messaged you guys and had no response. just sent an email too. this is probably a good test of your support I guess..
