Testing Grounds

So I moved from the doomed UplinkEarth to ReliableSite.net, which is cheap and impressive. And then, almost immediately, they had the biggest set of downtimes in their history (that’s what they say, but others tend to verify that). We’re talking days here. My sites were down for 48 hours, then they came up for maybe 8 hours, and then went down for another 24.

And it seems like hosting companies have some sort of customer relation retardation, because they didn’t post anything, or sent out e-mail (to domains they don’t host) saying, “Hey, wow, things are really screwed up here — we’re working as hard as we can.” That would, as many customers pointed out, make a big difference. Instead you’re just left with a dead site, wondering if they is happening just to your site or to everyones.

At any rate, that was a month ago and they seem fine since then.

But in the meanwhile I acquired two Danish domains (.dk). On that my wife-to-be has for her family, and one as the Danish counterpart to my regular sites. So now I have rezio.com, rezio.net, and rezio.dk.

But Danish domains can only be hosted on approved servers. This is a good example of socialist thinking. Instead of allowing anyone, anywhere, with any kind of intention, rent space with a Danish domain, the hosting outfits have to get approval. Right or wrong, I can’t host my Danish domains with ReliableSite.

So I found a reasonable Danish hosting service (or “web hotel” as they call it.) And so far I’m quite pleased. The first thing I did was set up something that points to my main site. I used the ASP.NET AdRotator control to randomly display some of my pictures, and clicking always takes you to rezio.net.

That was fine, but for reasons that I don’t understand my gallery stopped working after ReliableSite had their blackout. So the next thing I did was set up a sub-domain for the gallery. That’s at gallery.rezio.dk.

So for now I guess I’ll just keep both hosts. It’s more than I need, but they’re both cheap — both less than $100 a year. It’s worth it to have a comparison anyway.

Tags: ASP.NET, hosts by stan
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Michael Yablonowitz is the CEO of UplinkEarth, the company that, until recently, I happily used to host this site. Until about six months ago, when service and up-time took a dive. But, in his own words, “I took ingenuity and penny-pinching to a new level.” It shouldn’t surprise anyone then, that support was out-sourced to people that don’t know the system, and eventually the customer base is sold.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Yablonowitz started sending customers e-mail talking about “platform upgrades” and “new features”. What he was really talking about is selling the customers to another company. The “upgrade” was shoddy migration to a new data center with an entirely different (and from what I could tell, quite inferior) platform. They didn’t even bother to copy e-mail messages over.

This company has given me a lot of trouble over the last five months, and I’m not the only one that’s unhappy. And that’s not to mention the happy employees he bragged about. They’re unemployed now. But after all, firing everyone is the ultimate act of penny-pinching.

Tags: biz, hosts by stan
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