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Host of Broken Dreams

This site has been up and down like a yo-yo since Friday. All is better, though now that I’ve moved this domain and the Noteflight blog to a new hosting company: Slicehost. Slicehost seems very cool — they offer what seems at first like a bare-bones service (VPS hosting starting with a minimal Ubuntu Linux distro, no one-click installs or control panels). But it’s not so bare-bones once you realize that Slicehost provides really, really clear how-to articles that make it very straightforward to set up all the same stuff that you’d normally get from a more standard hosting service. And when you’re done doing what these articles explain, you understand how it all works: a great benefit. And you’ve got total control over the system you build, with root access and all. No one can @#$% with it. For an example of being @#$%ed with, you may continue reading.

My previous hosting company — referred to obliquely in the title of this post — blew up in this past week, to the point where I had to make an abrupt decision to pull everything off their servers. Here’s more or less what happens, starting Friday:

• With no warning, my Virtual Private Server account is moved to a new domain name and static IP. (You might wonder what the meaning of “static IP” is under these circumstances.)
• The old VPS instance continues running and is still accessible at its name and IP, so I assume everything is fine. However, all activity on that instance (including SVN commits) are written to a separate disk not associated with the new VPS.
• Those of my sites which are running on the new VPS instance break, because the new instance is misconfigured and can’t reach the DB server. Also its postfix install turns out to be broken due to bad permissions setup. So the new VPS is basically hosed.
• I wait over 48 hours for support to return my emails while my sites are down. I do not even receive an auto-reply for almost 36 hours.
• The same backup cron job is running on both VPS instances, unbeknownst to me. The job on the new instance backs up stale data that overwrites on the backups from the old VPS (which is still in use, because I haven’t been told yet which is the “real” instance).
• Support fixes the new VPS so it can reach the DB server, and the old VPS is removed. I switch all remaining services to the new VPS but start the process of pulling out.
• Support tells me that I was mistakenly charged for a hosting plan along with the VPS account, cancels the hosting plan, and credits my account with the prepaid balance. With the disappearance of the hosting plan, all my databases and user accounts promptly disappear before I can back them all up and migrate them elsewhere. All sites down again.
• Support reinstates the hosting plan. I pull everything remaining over to Slicehost and get it running again there.

It’s sad, because this hosting provider used to be a good deal, and delivered exactly what I needed at the point when I first started using them. I wish I could say the same today.

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