Weedy Lady
08-26-2008, 12:06 PM
I used to be just a teeny bit smug when people would start a thread here and say their web site disappeared. Smug is bad. Smug is dangerous, and smug is costly.
I wanted to share my experience with others so y'all can possibly avoid losing income for several days or more:
A friend and I both had our web sites with the same provider, fxstudios, which had been an excellent company for the over 4 years that we were with them - UNTIL - a few months ago their customer service ceased to exist. When either of us wrote to them we did not receive an answer, whereas in the past we always received an answer promptly, sometimes within an hour. Then their billing system got all messed up and we were both being "automatically" dunned for monthly payments that we had already made.
This should have been a message to both of us to find a new hosting company but we stuck with fx because of our past more than satisfactory relationship. That was a big mistake.
Last weekend fx disappeared. And so did both of our web sites. We did not receive any notice that they were going out of business. They were just GONE. But evidently they are not completely gone because yesterday I received another "automatic" billing notice from them.
It took a couple of days to find a new hosting company, set up the account, get everything loaded (yes, we both keep our entire web sites completely backed up on our own computers so we had what we needed to re-establish our sites), change the dns with our registrars and wait for the new url to propagate. I figure this change cost me between $150 and $200 in lost income and expenses. And it was fortunate that it was on a weekend when my normal traffic is low.
The moral of the story? If your hosting company is starting to slip -- and customer service level is usually the first indication -- do your research while you still have plenty of time to be thorough, and make the change.
Changing hosts is pretty easy (if you own and control your own domain name) and is best done while your existing web site is still on line so you will have no interruption in your web presence. And it does not in any way affect your rankings on any of the search engines.
Hope this tidbit will be helpful to someone out there.
I wanted to share my experience with others so y'all can possibly avoid losing income for several days or more:
A friend and I both had our web sites with the same provider, fxstudios, which had been an excellent company for the over 4 years that we were with them - UNTIL - a few months ago their customer service ceased to exist. When either of us wrote to them we did not receive an answer, whereas in the past we always received an answer promptly, sometimes within an hour. Then their billing system got all messed up and we were both being "automatically" dunned for monthly payments that we had already made.
This should have been a message to both of us to find a new hosting company but we stuck with fx because of our past more than satisfactory relationship. That was a big mistake.
Last weekend fx disappeared. And so did both of our web sites. We did not receive any notice that they were going out of business. They were just GONE. But evidently they are not completely gone because yesterday I received another "automatic" billing notice from them.
It took a couple of days to find a new hosting company, set up the account, get everything loaded (yes, we both keep our entire web sites completely backed up on our own computers so we had what we needed to re-establish our sites), change the dns with our registrars and wait for the new url to propagate. I figure this change cost me between $150 and $200 in lost income and expenses. And it was fortunate that it was on a weekend when my normal traffic is low.
The moral of the story? If your hosting company is starting to slip -- and customer service level is usually the first indication -- do your research while you still have plenty of time to be thorough, and make the change.
Changing hosts is pretty easy (if you own and control your own domain name) and is best done while your existing web site is still on line so you will have no interruption in your web presence. And it does not in any way affect your rankings on any of the search engines.
Hope this tidbit will be helpful to someone out there.