Dave Burke - I Survived a WebHost4Life Server Upgrade!

I Survived a WebHost4Life Server Upgrade!

And I didn't even get a lousy T-shirt.

About a week ago I received an email from WebHost4Life that began with:

Good News! On Sunday of March 19 2006, 11:30PM, your current hosting server will be upgraded. Existing hardware will also be changed to faster and better hardware.

When WH4L sends out a letter starting with "Good News!" it means I'm screwed. At least until they work out the bugs. And as of this moment, March 21, 2006, 2:32PM, the WH4L Mother Network is still on the fritz.

Hey, I like WH4L. I've said good things about them in the past, but this episode tested my loyalty almost to the breaking point. Like I always tell people, with WebHost4Life, you get what you pay for.

The upgrade notification letter estimated 15-20 minutes downtime, but it ended up being down almost 8 hours from early Monday AM and throughout the day, with frequent SQL Connection errors when the site was "up."

The thing about WebHost4Life is that they've got the best package for the money. Site performance and stability is usually pretty good. Not great, certainly, but pretty good. Execution, on the other hand, seems to be consistently mediocre. Like it's perfectly okay for clients to be down for hours over the course of an upgrade. Hey, as a longtime developer I know that stuff happens, things break, mistakes are made, but those are pretty poor performance expectations in my book.

And tech support? I've encountered some top notch WH4L support guys, for sure, but I often have to get past some of the dithering idiots on the front lines. Last evening, for instance, I submit a ticket asking for an explanation of why my sites (I have two sites at WH4L) were down for over 3 hours in the middle of the day, several hours after the upgrade occurred, and the idiot replies, "We had a server upgrade today. You should have received several letters about it."

No shit, Sherlock.

I'd like to give you the exact quote but the WebHost4Life Control Panel is throwing a SQL Connection error.

Provider error '80004005'
Unspecified error
/wcp/accountlogin.asp, line 527

So that was my Monday. Another banner day for the Baily Family and WebHost4Life Team.

Seriously, I'd like my T-shirt an Extra-Large.

[tags: WebHost4Life, Web Hosting]

Comments (12) | Post RSS RSS comment feed

Posted on 3/21/2006 11:01:00 AM by Dave Burke
Categories: Everyday
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3/21/2006 12:40:01 PM Permalink

Better you than me!

Seriously though, we use WebHost4Life to host Tourney Logic, and if we would have had that kind of downtime right now, we'd be screwed! We've gotten almost 1,000,000 hits since the NCAA tourney released the brackets. That could have been devastating to us!

Joel Ross |

3/21/2006 12:56:32 PM Permalink

Geez, Joel. I didn't think Tourney Logic was housed at WH4L, and yeah, this would have been a REALLY bad time for you if you were in the upgrade group. Was your site upgraded? Thanks for visiting. And yeah, definitely better me than Tourney Logic!

daveburke |

3/21/2006 3:48:02 PM Permalink

Hi Dave. WH4L transferred my site to another server a couple of weeks ago. Besides the fact that my site was offline for about one hour (which is comprehensible), it happened without a flaw. The only thing I had to do after the transfer was to adjust the permissions for the /photos/ folder. I'm pretty satisfied with their service.
PS: yes, I'm still alive ;)
PPS: No coComment support yet?

Thomas Freudenberg |

3/21/2006 6:28:02 PM Permalink

Hey, Thomas.  Glad to hear your WH4L transfer went well.  I would have been extremely happy with only an hour downtime.  It was as the day progressed and either my sites were down or only one page in four would load without a SQL error that started to annoy me!

I'm hoping for improvement in performance now on new servers.  We'll see.

As for CoComment support, to be honest, I haven't made a single mod since putting the CS 2.0 site online.  Maybe a bit gun-shy at the moment?  Letting the site run for a while before I start playing with it.

Great to hear from you.  Thanks for visiting!

3/21/2006 6:32:55 PM Permalink

Yeah, we host Tourney Logic there, as well as Tourneytopia.com, and I host RossCode.com there too. None of those were upgraded yet.

I think we bypassed the upgrade for Tourney Logic because we requested to be moved a while ago to a server that supported .NET 2.0, so maybe we got moved to an already upgraded server.

RossCode.com never gets upgraded becauase I signed up back when they actually had Web Hosting 4 Life - pay a one-time fee and get hosting for life. It sounded like a good deal at the time, and I'm too cheap to pay . The downside is that it never gets upgraded, and I don't have .NET support, hence the reason my blog runs on PHP.

3/21/2006 6:40:54 PM Permalink

Hey, Joel! Thanks for clearing that up. I was wondering about it. That also explains the mySQL error I noticed yesterday at rosscode.com. Funny, I think of how much I pay for cell phone service each month (and rarely use) and comparatively how much less I pay for a host provider, I don't have a problem paying more for a better host service. When I find one, I'll probably consider it. Moving is such a pain though... Thanks again for answering my questions about your move. Hope March Madness is good for you this year!

3/21/2006 6:55:07 PM Permalink

Recently I saw some threads on CS.Org about WH4L. In last instance, someone had faced with same problems and asked for professional .NET hosters to migrate.
Generally, I can say that WH4L is a good hoster for blogs and some websites like yours and mine (although in latest 2 days I got many errors from your server).
Wait more, maybe they were right and you will see better services soon ;)

Keyvan Nayyeri |

3/21/2006 7:02:41 PM Permalink

Keyvan, great hearing from you! I'll have to look for that CS thread calling for .NET hosters to migrate. Sounds interesting. But you're absolutely right about WH4L and I agree with you that for sites like ours, WH4L is a great value for the money with decent performance and adequate service. After this upgrade incident though, I don't think I would recommend them to a small business or client. And you're also correct that we very well may see better service soon, in which case I'll think about giving that WH4L recommendation again.

3/21/2006 9:26:29 PM Permalink

There are many threads about hosters on CS.Org (especially about WH4L) but this is the last one:
communityserver.org/.../ShowThread.aspx#521447

3/21/2006 9:30:33 PM Permalink

Thank you, Keyvan. I read it. Interesting. I'll have to search for other threads on CSForums on the topic if stability is rock solid after this upgrade or if I continue to see SQL problems.

3/22/2006 8:07:44 AM Permalink

I had your same problem Dave, I've upgraded my connections to the new server 2 days ago and for the moment seems (I repeat, it seems ehehe) that the new SQL Server is a bit fast than the previous.
However, I'm a WH4L user from 4 years and I'm really satisfied for the service, at least until now...

Stefano Demiliani |

3/22/2006 8:16:38 AM Permalink

Stefano, Thanks for sharing your WH4L experience. Sorry you went through the same trouble. I THOUGHT you were on WH4L! I saw that your feed was offline for much of Monday. I didn't check the site, but I assumed it was down, too. Funny, in my Great News RSS Reader, down feeds are in red. There were a LOT of red feeds on Monday. Yours wasn't the only one.

Yes, I'm generally satisfied with WH4L, too...until now. And yes, at the moment things do seem a bit faster. We'll see how things go from here out.

Dave Burke : Freelance .NET Web Developer specializing in Online Communities

I Survived a WebHost4Life Server Upgrade!

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