Apparently the shared server was being brought to its knees by unusual traffic to my site (it wasn't clear exactly what - only that my site was bringing the server down again every time they tried to restart it). I'm fairly certain it was a spambot attack, possibly combined with one or more search engines trying to index my site.
They wanted to move me to a better plan where I'd be more isolated from other users - understandable - and, to be honest, both Lou Honick and Neil Heuer at HostMySite have been trying to get me to move to a VPS for a while, partly because they want me to see how it performs and write about my experience I suspect.
I said I was happy on shared hosting but the tech on the phone said they really wanted to move me so I told them to do whatever they felt was necessary. They said it would take several hours - to build out a new VPS and copy everything from my old site. Sure enough, throughout the afternoon, I received a steady stream of emails as parts of the infrastructure were brought up.
Once I noticed the site was actually working again, I started to explore the new site admin console and see exactly what they were offering.
The VPS uses the Virtuozzo Power Panel which allows you to SSH into the server (via a Java applet in a browser window) and also has a lot of system monitoring and management features. My initial impression is that it's very good. I'll write up more detailed notes in the next few days I expect.
There were a couple of lingering glitches that I noticed and when I pinged support again, they called me - on my home phone - and walked me through everything I needed to know about the new setup and resolved the issues I had.
I've always had very good experiences with HostMySite but today's experience was above and beyond the call of duty.
The site response is still extremely slow than usual from here in India. This particular entry took more than 30 secs to show up.
Although I'm looking at a windows plan.
Love to hear more of your thoughts.
Michael www.chapter31.com/
Glad to hear HMS did well for you. The box that runs firemoss.com and model-glue.com (as well as sites for Doug Hughes and Scott Stroz) is one of their dedicated machines, and their service over the past few years has been absolutely top-notch.
PS - Welcome back
mmh strange..
cheers to HMS for their excellent CS!!
It really was down for way longer than usual at hostmysite.
Thanks for the easy day at work!
@All, good to hear other positive experiences with HMS!
FYI: If /opt/coldfusionmx is owned by root and ColdFusion runs under the apache user (a common setup), ColdFusion cannot create the Mail folder tree...
On the credits your waiting for, if you give me a call I can have my team research it and get it resolved.
Stacy Griggs Vice President Sales HostMySite.com sgriggs@hostmysite.com Toll free: 1-866-918-4678x1335 Direct: 302-709-2157 http://www.HostMySite.com
I am glad that you always had very good experiences with us. I remembered that I fixed duplicate function issue with sandbox security when your site was moved from SmarterLinux to Linux Builder account long time ago (2005?). Contact us if any issues on your VPS.
