I just want to take a bit of time to talk about why having a good host is so important.
We have put together a website for a client recently and it should have been a simple job. Apart from their hosting company, which made things difficult every step of the way.
The first hurdle was that they only allowed a single FTP user (I will never understand why), and they forced that user to have different credentials to the main account. Good security measure you might think… Yes, but it was implemented in a horrific way. The only way to get a password for this user was to click a button in the control panel (not cPanel, some custom overlay) and wait an indeterminate amount of time for the system to email a generated password. Great.
It took 24 hours to do so. One day waisted.
Once we got the password we could get into the file system and sort out everything. So we thought. The host had set an astoundingly short time-out on all transfers. This host’s servers are physically located the other side of the planet from us so there is bound to be a bit of latency. So no go, it would time out constantly.
Plan B, gzip everything (or tarball it…) and download. Genius!
Apparently not. Despite all our efforts, every single zip, gzip and tarball we downloaded was corrupted. So something on their system hated us.
What should have been a routine job was made infinitely more difficult by having a host that was locked-down and had a poor system that just couldn’t handle simple tasks.
More than a little annoying.
We suggested that the client move their hosting to Site5, who have an awesome track record, great hosting panel and respond to client questions within a guaranteed 6 hours.
They also have a function to allow developers limited access to your account in order to set-up sites or make changes.
