Posted by Megan on September 24th, 2011
Filed under: Website

So, I for the past few years I was hosted by Holdfire, a small company owned by Jordan Miskowisc/jordanriane of Ngametv. Generally it was a horrible host, the worst host I’ve ever had, and I was with Lypha. That’s saying something. There was a lot of downtime, she clearly did not know what she was doing, and was always rude to her customers. I’m not the only person who feels that Holdfire and its support was lacking. But they were cheap. Especially in early September. Supposedly sometime between the beginning of June (when Holdfire’s Twitter account stopped being updated) and then Jordan sold Holdfire. No one was notified, and if there was a new owner they clearly had less interest in it than Jordan. EditDNS which provided services for Holdfire was closing their users were encouraged to switch to their company. To let people know they were having scheduled downtime for their clients. Which of course affected their clients clients as well. Meaning me and all the other Holdfire users. So much downtime. Whoever was running Holdfire didn’t know/care about this. When I saw the message from EditDNS and realized that Holdfire could soon disappear due to the negligence of its owner, I began backing up my site. I made it in time, and luckily still had my birthday money to pay for a new host. It was between three companies, SharkSpace, WHB, and Beachcomber. I had domain monitors on sites I knew were hosted by them since the last time I was trying to decide on a new host. Then it was between four, SharkSpace, WHB, Beachcomber, and Holdfire. Clearly I made the bad choice there. I wasn’t even sure about my choice then either, which is why I set up the domain monitors, so next time I would be. All did well for the first couple years, then the first two started having more and more downtime. Beachcomber was the only one that was consistently up. And they had a half off deal. I couldn’t afford reseller hosting anymore, but I’m okay with that. This is even better in some ways since all my sites are together again instead of being spread out through several different accounts.

Before signing up I sent Beachcomber an email, just to make sure they were still around. Unlike Holdfire they don’t seem to have a forum, blog, or Twitter account, so there’s no way to tell if they’re still active. Just looking at Holdfire itself wouldn’t clue you in, but seeing that their Twitter account hasn’t been updated in almost 4 months is enough. I soon got an email back saying they were still alive and kicking, with an lol thrown in. A little unprofessional, but prompt. After signing up I soon got a call from them, which I was expecting. Most hosts call to confirm but most hosts are big companies who use automated systems. I had to talk to an actual, human person. I am determined never to do it again!!! Outside my family at least… At least there’s comfort in the fact that phone anxiety is actually pretty common. After that my account was set up within minutes. So far Beachcomber has had great uptime. But there have been some problems, the biggest being something to do with the way the server is set up. I’ve never had this problem with any host before, but there was some server setting interfering with WordPress and Enthusiast. It really, really drove me crazy, but eventually I found a solution to it, and now everything is working perfectly now. Though my IP was locked out for several hours due to my tinkering.

I have unpinned my status post, but I am still not done uploading everything. I had almost 24000 files to upload, which is a lot for a normal connection. With my borrowed wireless that has close to dial-up speeds it takes fucking forever. Some files I had to upload twice because the first time they didn’t upload correctly. I still have a few thousand at least to go, but I’ve got all my fanlistings up, as well as this blog, which are the important things. TFL and TAFL have had to deal with a lot of messages from me for the past year, what with all my internet and hosting problems. Hopefully now they will both be corrected.

My mother was wrong, and Cyndy was coming back tonight, not yesterday. So I’ll call her tomorrow and Monday, and hopefully, hopefully, hopefully I’ll have internet installed this week or the first week of October. The internet has been particularly shitty the past few days, not that it isn’t always. The way to find out whether internet is working for me is this: Is this internet not working? It’s not working. Is the internet working? It’s not working. “The internet is working” just means Comcast hasn’t set up their blockade, “The internet isn’t working” means they have. It doesn’t mean I can always actually get on. I really want to get internet before this connection goes down again. Because it is going down again. This has been happening since February and every time it happens again sooner, and for a longer period of time. I know the signs now and when the blockade is approaching, and the signs are here.

Oh, and I had to be responsible recently… I had money leftover after hosting and… I had to spent $36 on flash drives. *sigh* I’m getting 32 GB, but you don’t actually get all that. It would actually take 60 GB to backup everything I need to keep safe, but I don’t have that kind of money right now. Spending that much on two 16 GB drives that won’t even hold everything I need was hard, when I could buy a lot more other things for less, but it’s important.

Tags: beachcomber, holdfire, hosting, Internet, online, technology, websites