New server now
Submitted by Wayne on Sun, 2007-12-23 18:00.
Site improvement
TuscanyCircle is now on its new server. Hopefully, the new and improved hardware and software services will make this site better (e.g., faster). Please let me know immediately if you notice anything wrong with the site as a result of the move.
The move has been just short of disastrous for me. Two critical tools are completely broken and unrecoverable. It'll take me weeks to find replacement applications and re-enter thousands of records into them. Drupal, the CMS engine running the portions of the site you see, is crippled unless I downgrade PHP. As this older version of PHP is being abandoned soon, I still have to figure out what's up with this. Since the last copy from the old site to the new one was several days old (how the heck is this justified?), I've had to manually recreate tons of new content, including emails that would otherwise have been permanently lost. When help tickets were opened with my hosting service, they were ignored all day long! This last bit of unacceptable piss-poor service is definitely new to 5dollarhosting, and I sincerely hope it's the last time it happens. Given our current woes associated with our house, which are still ongoing, this move could not have come at a worse time for me.
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getting worse
I didn't think it possible but 5dollarhosting's customer service is actually getting worse. I'm sure much of it is due to being overloaded with help tickets as a result of their poorly managed move. (E.G., they're now suffering from their failure to transfer recent email from the old servers to the new, times thousands of customers.) Response time has gone from minutes (typically 10-30) to days. The actual responses are completely inadequate and utterly fail to address the issues raised.
Several features on the new servers are either not available (e.g., ssh) or aren't working at all (email filtering). Other features are scaled so far back as to be nearly useless (tiny white- and black-lists). Incompatibilities are rampant, at least for those of us with websites larger than a couple HTML pages. Several domains are now off-limits to email forwarders (including my daughter's). There are several people I just can't email these days. I don't know why, but spam volume has more than tripled overnight, but to stop it, I'd have to lock down the criteria so tight that no mail would get through--except for those spams erroneously "whitelisted" by the server (at a point beyond my control).
I've even attempted to pay them more money for certain additional features, yet they've done everything they can to avoid the 2 minutes of effort necessary to collect the money from me. With as many customers as they must be losing, I don't see how they can justify this. At this point, I would get better service with an unmanaged hosting arrangement, where I do all my own administration.
I just moved three other domains to 5dollarhosting, and now I'm starting to regret it.