After quite a lot of research and recommendations from several people I think I have concluded that I will be going with HostGator. They have a very good reputation and have positive feedback. I am giving up a little bit. IX Web Hosting did provide dedicated IP addresses for each domain while Host Gator has a single shared IP address across the account. IX Web Hosting also allowed unlimited disk space and throughput where Host Gator does have limitations. Quite honestly the size limitations on the Host Gator offering is so high that it may as well be unlimited for sites such as mine. I had initially considered going with just a shared account but after talking to a very friendly person via Host Gator chat I decided to instead go with a reseller account. It is a little more money but it will work out much better for what I am trying to do. I am currently in the process of working through the order process. Host Gator has a promotion going right now that gives you 20 percent off your initial order which will definitely come in handy. According to their support staff once my payment is received I should have a new account set up within an hour or two. From there I can begin the migration process to move from IX Web Hosting to the new hosting servers at Host Gator. I am sure this is just a temporary move as I think ultimately I will probably go with a Virtual Private Server (VPS) that I will support myself. Until then Host Gator will be a great place to be. At least I won’t be dealing with being down out have services unavailable for several days without any notification or assistance. If you’re looking for low cost hosting I suggest looking at HostGator, I think you’ll like what you see. I’ll try to keep you posted as to how the move goes and what my experience is with this new vendor. I’ll also post an update on how painful it might be to try and get my money back from IX Web Hosting.

Timing of course could not have been worse. All of this occurred just before I left for vacation making it impossible for me to deal with things while I was gone. I have continued to check the status of the problem tickets I have open and of course they remain open without any updates. My frustration levels reached new heights and I shot off an email to the president of the company. Someone on his staff was assigned to the problem but even then it took over 4 days for the problem to finally be escalated to resolution. This morning as we got ready to leave Utah for Idaho for the next leg of our vacation my sites were finally properly restored and the appropriate modules loaded.
I will be spending the next several days attempting to get things back up to date but this process may take upwards of 2 weeks since I have been down for over a week and I have 10-12 sites that will need to be upgraded. You can expect to see updates first appear on Now Hitting followed by Arizona Lanyards. I will next focus on Diary of a Diehard then move on to Jeff D Summers and 1 Photo 2 Share then this blog. I ask for your patience and suggest checking back often as content will be updated as time permits. This is not exactly what I had planned to do on my vacation but I guess that is the price I pay for going with a company like IX Web Hosting. If anyone has a recommendation for a new hosting provider that is relatively cost effective I am willing to listen to any and all suggestions.

Those of you who have read this blog in the past know that I use IX Web Hosting as my web provider for this site along with countless others that I maintain. For the most part I am relatively happy with their service and servers. That does not mean it is not without problems just that I am content for the most part. Today I was working on Diary of a Diehard updating it with my latest post. I was also adding game data on Now Hitting. It was a typical day and not much different than normal. During the morning hours I did encounter a connection error when trying to get to one of the sites. It was intermittent but definitely an IP socket error. I went to IX Web Hosting and asked if they could check the network to see if perhaps there were issues on their end. A while back IX Web Hosting outsourced their technical support to the Ukraine and since then the customer service has degraded badly. I used to get responses to my inquiries within a few minutes now I am lucky to get a response within 8 hours so I didn’t expect to hear anything back in a timely fashion.
This evening Dakota and I went to the Diamondbacks game where we saw a great game with the Diamondbacks winning 1-0 in extra innings. After the game we watched the Friday night fireworks display and then made our way home. My typical routine is to come home and update Now Hitting with the latest box score and who won the condiment race. I went to my computer and launched a browser window to begin my update. When I went to Now Hitting instead of my web page I received an error message. I retyped the address thinking I had made a mistake but it came back with the same result. I tried my other web sites including this one and likewise got the same error. I immediately opened a problem ticket with IX Web Hosting and entered their on-line chat to get someone to start looking at the issue.
I was told that my sites had been suspended due to non-compliance with the terms of service. I had no idea what that meant. They explained to me that my web sites had overloaded the server. I could not believe what I was hearing. These are not high traffic sites where thousands of people visit each hour. There are days I wish they were but I have no delusions of grandeur and know that these are destined to be small sites. I was told that I had to fix my sites before service would be restored. The funky part was that they would not tell me what to fix. Instead I had to respond to a message in their problem ticket system acknowledging that I had overloaded the server and promise I would not do it again. How was I supposed to do that? I had no idea what they were even talking about. I went round and round with the online chat guy and was getting nowhere. After 4 hours of frustration I finally went to bed. The next morning the sites were still offline and no status of when they might be back online. Three hours later I received a message saying that what had caused the problem was an automated script that would publish one picture per day to my 1 Photo 2 Share photo blog. Are you kidding me? Posting a picture per day will bring their server down? And for this they decided to shut down all of my web sites until I removed the code. The thing was, that code was removed the night before when I first started talking to technical support. Not because I thought it was a problem but because I was getting tired of receiving the emails it produced telling me it could not connect to execute the script. So the problem was resolved from my end within 7 minutes of the server going down yet I my service was disrupted for nearly 18 hours. Not only did it impact 1Photo2Share but all of my sites. I requested compensation from my downtime since they caused an outage and they have a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee. I was told that was not appropriate since I caused the problem. I beg to differ, I am not the one who took my sites offline. This has been a very frustrating experience. I have lodged a complaint with the Better Business Bureau and I am beginning to search for a new hosting company. If anyone has a recommendation of where I could host 16-20 web sites with their own dedicated IP addresses please let me know. I am getting tired of having my sites held hostage on this host.