UplinkEarth managed to make an enemy out of me today. I don’t use them for my personal blog or any new sites. Frankly, I’m not using Coldfusion much anymore and I don’t particularly care for Windows servers. I rely on Dreamhost and Media Temple for my hosting needs these days. (Yeah, I know that Dreamhost decided to charge me for 2009 a year in advance a couple of months ago, but they fixed the issue and my site was never down—just my available balance on my credit card.)
Hey UplinkEarth, I know it can be hard work to provide good support for a cheap price, but what the heck! Today, I was treated to the following issues:
- The database does not reflect the data that was present as recently as last week. All event data is gone for the moment.
- The files seem to be at least a month old—I had recently updated a couple of files with new code, so I know what they should have looked like.
- Several files were not restored to their proper directory outside of the webroot (www). My site relied on that data as it was written in Coldfusion and used an application.cfm file, components, custom tags and a bit of magic to serve up a pretty decent custom app.
- Also the “shared” folder is no longer mapped to the shared SSL cert that was related to the authentication scripts on the site.
I have never had such a crappy experience with a host. Heck, they’ve had their servers hacked three times in the last year. I’ve had javascript redirects take over the site in question several times.
So why did I stick around long enough that they really screwed up? It wasn’t my choice. The small organization that is currently using the site in question wasn’t ready to pay for a transition to a new platform and the coding costs that would entail. (They only pay about $300 per year for Coldfusion hosting and a shared certificate, so they weren’t keen on changing… I bet that changes now.)
So for all of you looking for a good host. Avoid UplinkEarth for the moment. Maybe they’ll straighten out, but until they do, even they seem to realize that selling more service is a bad idea—their site won’t let you buy anything at the moment.
I ditched them a few months ago when their FTP was compromised and they had to resort to white-listing by IP to let people in, and even then it was only for 5 minutes. Then their account database was hacked and some of my sites were defaced.
I have a couple dedicated boxes for various projects from xlhost.com now and they’re great
Yeah, I had the same hacked site issue earlier this year. If it weren’t for this one client who was reluctant to move because of cost, I would have been completely off the host.
xlhost looks interesting from a cost to value standpoint, but I’m not interested in managing my own server from the operating system up at the moment. (Tim, you were always better at that than I.)
Going forward, I’m looking to resell Media Temple’s grid service or something comparable for any small to medium sized sites. I’m all about the dedicated virtual server for anything larger—who *needs* a whole server for anything short of enterprise data management?