Thursday, February 23, 2012

Time to Say Goodbye: JustHost.com


86% uptime... really??? Thanks JustHost.com

This is a review of JustHost.com and lemme tell you, it's not a positive review...

I'd heard bad things about these guys but I'd always given them the benefit of the doubt.

And maybe they were always this bad and I just never really paid much attention. After all my website was on Dripbook.com and largely remained "unattended" for the last 2 years.

But ever since my class at NYFA I've been revamping my website. First it was a move away from Dripbook.com and onto a custom WordPress site. I tried several themes and settled on the current one you see at www.lucima.com which took me a good week or two just to install and learn my way around the new platform.

Then it was a matter of populating the new CMS with content. After all that's what the C in CMS stands for (content management system). Which took several weeks because I'd do things in spurts. The WordPress platform combined with this particular theme allows me to direct more attention to specific parts of LUCIMA STUDIO. For example right now I'm promoting our next workshop and so it's the first thing you see on the homepage of lucima.com

But as I worked on the website more and more over the three months, I noticed that the uptime on the website was inconsistent. Usually it worked and then sometimes it didn't. The first sign of problems was about a month ago when I discovered that the images for the site were loading extremely slowly. The help desk was of no use. Fast forward 1 month later and my site is down 15% of the time. How do I know this? Rodney Alan sent me a link to tools.pingdom.com which is a great tool that every web administrator should have. At first I thought it was my ISP but pingdom.com uses servers around the world to check connectivity to the domain of your choice. So I know I'm not crazy.

I tried getting JustHost to troubleshoot the issue. The livechat guy said they were aware of the issue and they're "working on it". No ETA on when the issue would be resolved though. I escalated the issue via a trouble ticket. The response was, "We tested it and everything seems to be working fine" even though I sent them various screenshots from pingdom.com demonstrating the 5-minute-interval pings that showed 15% downtime.

So I'm leaving. I can't get JustHost to change lucima.com onto a different server so there's no reason to stay. As we speak I'm waiting for confirmation for backup extraction on the new domain host InMotion. So far they've been responsive. I don't know how intricate the backup extraction process is and how difficult it will be to migrate fully off the old JustHost.com servers and onto the InMotion servers. I should know by the end of tonight.

Time to say goodbye JustHost.com

Here are some reviews of InMotion.com that I used to make my decision to move. It's hard since there's so much crap out there to sift through:

http://webhostinggeeks.com/user-reviews/
http://www.webhostingbreak.com/host-review/inmotion-hosting/

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