switch

I haven't been able to blog due to the fact my now-previous web host provider, ProNIC Solutions, had intermittent or no connectivity for FIVE HOURS. None of their sites worked, not even the pronicsolutions.com home page. Ping replies were in the 700+ millisecond range (average is 65ms or less). Did they fix the problem? Sure. FIVE HOURS LATER. Were there any announcements made on the support page, like "This is what caused the bad connectivity [insert well-written and thoughtful reason here]"? Nope. NOTHING. All yesterday Sunday afternoon and into the evening, my site wouldn't load. I tried it from two different ISP's (Verizon and Brighthouse) - so it wasn't my computer's fault.

I find this so ironic because just recently I said how good and reliable they were. Boy, was I wrong.

I switched to Fluid Hosting. They were one of the very few out there that had a unix plan (the "medium" for those interested) that worked for me. So far, so good. I have all my domains transferred over, all the mail is working and so on.

I seem to encounter a recurrent pattern every two to three years concerning web hosts.

This is what happens:

I sign up for a web hosting plan. It works well. Everything is lickety-split lightning fast. Then for absolutely no reason whatsoever, the server my site is on or the router or switch that server is plugged into starts to fail. Connectivity is spotty or my site just plain doesn't work at all. I think to myself Well.. maybe it's just a fluke. It'll probably clear up in a day or two. And yes, it does.

However, the problem isn't fixed. It's "patched" and gets progressively worse.

I use SiteUptime to monitor web site outages (and I highly recommend it). Since May of this year, there have been a total of 16 outages while my site was hosted on ProNIC. That's not a typo. Sixteen times. And for some strange unknown reason, all Perl scripts slowed down to a crawl between 4:00a.m. and 5:00a.m. EST.

Here's the kicker:

The IP for the server my site was on is physically in Orlando Florida or extremely close to it. I live in Tampa Florida, less than 100 miles away. There is absolutely no reason in the world any connectivity "chop" or slowness should ever occur. Yet it did.

But I dealt with it.

Until yesterday.

That five hour outage was the last straw. I call it "outage" because if your site doesn't load or connectivity is intermittnent to the point of being 1/4 the speed of dialup, that's an outage as far as I'm concerned.

Some of you out there will see this post immediately, but others won't see this until one to three days later. That's the way the internet works when you switch hosts. Such is life.