My former hosting service, webhost4life.com, abruptly shut down the old site for "abusive server use" with no further explanation. I had been using them since 15 Sep 2005. Other former users of this hosting service have suggested that this meant that my site had become too popular and was using more server resources than they had available -- "over selling," sort of like airlines overbooking seats -- even though I was paying for these service capabilities. The "abusive" part is a mystery.
The good news-- nearly everything had been recently backed-up. However, I am taking this opportunity to upgrade some of the software and cleanup the site.
The bad news-- the back-ups of some of the server side databases was incomplete, and webhost4life provided no way for me to recover the information from their servers. Restoring this information will require considerable manual, time consuming reconstruction.
My new hosting service is Fluidhosting.com. I now have been with them since 23 October 2007. Selecting a web hosting service is not much better than a crap-shoot, but FluidHosting.com seemed to have excellent customer reviews. This page will provide a periodic review of my experiences with them.
As of this date, 20 February, 2008, my experiences with FluidHosting have been excellent. I now have three sites hosted there. I have noticed improvements in server response times. As with all new sites (even those that are basically just being moved) there was a learning curve getting to known a new control panel interface and their specific implementation of various features. But their support staff has been very helpful and responsive. In almost all cases they have responded to my support requests in less than an hour, often in 10-15 minutes. Their responses have been to the point and fix the issue, usually without the need for any back-and-forth correspondence. They also don't talk extreme "techie" or talk down to you. They are one of the few technical support groups I've worked with who seem to know how to write sentences that are intelligible, with subjects and predicates, and with a minimum of terms that are meaningless to us simple folks on the street. I'm a happy camper. Inexpensive does not mean "cost effective." You get what you pay for.
For those who have been using this site principally for the Brookhaven/South Haven Hamlets, NY community section (by far the largest of my sites), it has been moved to its own URL BrookhavenSouthHaven.org.
John Deitz
Page revised: 20 February, 2008