Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[Focus Fusion Society]

Thanks for the info! Is the site you linked to reliable? They don’t say anything about their criteria for choosing top hosts, etc. Given the trouble we’ve had with our current host, I don’t want to pick a new one off some website at random. Anyone else have suggestions for an ideal server/host? Let me know.

Also, my apologies for the recent site inconsistency. Some explanations/excuses:

The most recent site outage on the 9th, 10th & 11th of April were due to our registrar randomly switching our DNS pointers to some other site. Not sure why or how this happened, but that was not a host/server issue. It was a renegade domain registrar corruption thing (?)

The intermittent outage on Mar. 26, 27, 29 and 30 – does seem to be a server problem. Unfortunately, i was in Turkey when that happened, with belated internet access so I didn’t complain to the host until I found out about it, in a crowded little internet cafe outside of Diyarbakir on the 30th. So that might be chalked up to a vacationing administrator problem. Happy Nowruz, by the way! Spring is here!

A more serious problem is that the administrator (me) resides in Iran for the time being, and this seems to have created a few access problems with the website. The site is going through some kind of migration of servers initiated by the host, which is taking an inordinate amount of time and during which time I have been unable to access some (but not all) parts of the control panel (a problem not encountered by folks in the US. A problem I don’t have after migration, as seen on another site of mine that went through this with this host. They are moving from vdeck1 to vdeck3). This may mean that we need a US based administrator/webmaster. Any volunteers? You need to know how to use expression engine, which is really fun and easy to use. I’ve just scratched the surface with it. Also other basic webmastering skills.

I’m frustrated with the host, but hope that after their migration, things will settle down/stabilize and I can get back to my list of things to overhaul on the site. So one option is to be patient and hope that this works itself out soon. On the other hand, “soon” has proven to be a very long time. Perhaps time to change hosts.

Frustration with the present host is offset by worries about changing hosts altogether. E.g., these guys are allegedly about to get their act together/server problems will all be behind us soon, while on the other hand a new host would be untested, plus there’s the worry that migrating this site over to a new host entirely could also have downtime and loss of data/other unexpected problems. (This kind of rationalization is probably why Iran hasn’t had another revolution yet. We just make do with what we’ve got :cheese: )

A long way of saying, it may be worth it to change hosts at this time, but we want to be really sure of the host we go to, and that such a change can occur seamlessly. We’re looking into it, but if you have any bright suggestions, guarantees and reassurances, let us know.