Changing hosts, need opinions

[stacyzara]

Hi all, hope this is the right place for this post!

We're currently looking into changing our host (who is currently Aplus, formerly Cedant before they sold to Aplus). Everything is alright, except their customer service, which is practically non-existant if your issue isn't an easy fix, and their MySQL service. We recently (within the past year or two) implemented a live chat function on our website that uses a MySQL database. Their MySQL service is unreliable, sometimes working fine for months and other times going down (and kicking all operators and chatters from the live chat service) as often as every fifteen seconds.

We're losing business when someone comes to chat and the service isn't reliable. There's nothing more frustrating than waiting on an operator that never shows up, or losing a chat in the middle of asking a question. At first they seemed ready to work with us to resolve the problem, but now emails are going unanswered and submitted logs of the outages are likely going unseen by the technicians that need to see them.

Does anyone have any good suggestions for a good host with reliable MySQL service?? Any help would be greatly appreciated, we're afraid to trade bad for worse. Thanks in advance!

[LD]

I know Blue Genesis offers a "live chat" feature with their hosting plans. However, I do not know the details of the inner workings of the feature. I have frequently used it as the "user", but not from an the opperator/support side.

[stacyzara]

LD, thanks for the quick response We don't really want to change the live chat we have on our site currently. We use a free program called Livezilla and it really is amazing! When the MySQL service works the live chat works flawlessly. We just need to find a host with a more reliable MySQL service. Thanks anyway!

[LD]

Understood. They also do offer PHP, ASP, Access and MySQL services as well, which to my knowledge, all have been reliable. Having said that, I have to advise, I've only one client using MySQL database in their hosting environment and haven't fielded a single complaint from them in over 3 years.

[stacyzara]

LD, thanks again. Is your client using Blue Genesis for their hosting? We're anxious to change to a host that has reliable service, despite the headache that switching hosts is likely going to be.

[LD]

Yes, I have several clients hosting there. I'd check with them to ensure you can port over your existing app(s) without issue. It's been a while, but I believe they have an online chat feature to speak with tech support on this before deciding. Mind you, they probably aren't the only good host around, but it's the only one I can speak to.

[qdb]

what kind of server load are we talking about?
sounds like you're talking about a 10$/month shared host .... if that's the case i would recommend hosthead, I used it for facebook applications hosting, which is very heavy on the sql use and it can take it.

[SmokieMac]

I've been using APLUS for many years for several of my own sites as well as most of my clients. For a long time APLUS had excellent technical support, then went to hell, then came back to good again. Now I'm getting just what you describe: unless it is a simple issue, they don't help and almost never accept that one of their functions isn't working well. (I just sent their CEO a letter of complaint, not that it will do any good).

However, I've never had a problem with their MySQL. Except for a few seconds of "database not found" problems yesterday when I was hitting the server pretty hard doing maintenance, never a problem. But maybe I don't hit them hard enough.

I have used several other shared hosting companies and gotten better support, but see their tools like MySQL all about the same.

Have you considered installing your own MySQL on your shared server, if they allow it. If you can install it on your own computer for testing, you should have the skill to install it on your shared server. Just a thought.

[stacyzara]

qdb - yea a $10/mth shared host would be fine, I'll definitely look into hosthead, thanks!

SmokieMac - Although I'm sorry you're dealing with the same issues with APlus, because I know how darn frustrating they are, I have to be honest and say I'm glad it's not only us! I think our problem with the MySQL has to do with the constant use of our live chat function. We sell worldwide, and so we try to have an operator available as early/late as possible, which means someone is usually logged in 18 out of 24 hours, and as soon as there's a "database not found" error it, unfortunately, kicks all operators offline. We also use a similar database for our blog (wordpress) installation, and don't notice the same problems with it, we figure because it's not in constant use like the live chat is.

We thought about installing our own MySQL, but looking into it, it seems like it would cost thousands of dollars to acquire the software we'd need to do such. This live chat is the only thing we use MySQL for, other than Wordpress, so maybe there's something I'm missing as I'm not very versed in MySQL? I'm sure we could figure out how to install it if we could find a cost-friendly option. Any ideas? Thanks in advance. Other than the MySQL service and their obviously non-existent technical support we don't have a problem with APlus, as our website seems to stay up and active almost all the time, not to mention the headache the changing hosts is likely to be.

Thanks again to everyone for your replies!

[SmokieMac]

it seems like it would cost thousands of dollars to acquire the software we'd need to do such...
I know it differs from host to host, and have never installed my own MySQL with APLUS (I'm using theirs), I don't see why you can't just install MySQL in your own space and then use the other stuff already provided (e.g. PHP). MySQL is free.

Although most install MySQL as part of a package when they install on their own machine for development, I installed each component separately on two of my test machines. (I can't remember why I didn't just install the package with MySQL, PHP etc.) Maybe you can try it out on your own machine and see if you think you can handle it on your APLUS server. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see where you would have thousands of dollars of software to buy.

Although I've been doing software work since the 1970's (oh my!) I'm by no means a tech wizard. If I can do it you can. Good luck!