It's been insanely busy in a good way lately. I have been doing some technical screenings, but mostly doing a LOT of development. I ventured into the realm of Objective-C and iPad programming and looking forward to doing a lot more of it.

But in the midst of all that madness, I encountered an issue with my hosting provider. But first, a little history on how I came to use them. Prior to ASPNix, I used webhost4life. For a good couple of years, webhost4life hosting worked out, as I had multiple domains and they were inexpensive. There seemed to be some latency issues with my sites though, causing intermittent timeouts. None of my sites are high volume, so I could live with it. However, due to a sale or some other reason, they upgraded their servers. That in itself is a good thing, except the broke all my sites in the process. I contacted them, as I had been so busy, I had not updated my sites in at least 6 months. None of the AJAX was working as well. When I opened a ticket with them, I was informed it was a programming issue, but I managed after some effort to convince them it wasn't. The sites sort of worked, but the latency issues continued, so I decided to leave them.

I searched, and it's difficult to find reliable, affordable shared hosting with good support. I settled on ASPNix, and for the first few months, I was really impressed. The latency issues were gone and I had excellent control of my sites from the control panel.

All was well until earlier this month (when I was at my peak busiest, go figure). They needed to do some email maintenance, and apparently, the only notification they did of their maintenance was on their forums. That was one plus at webhost4life, you knew in advance. ASPNix began the email maintenance on Friday night, but I didn't notice until Saturday morning that I was not getting any email nor was I able to send any. My business life is email, so to be down any amount of time is a problem.

I immediately opened a support ticket, and was directed to the forum where it described the outage as expected to last only 3 hours long. Since we were well past that time frame, I responded to technical support that I would like an update, as I was expecting some important emails regarding a project I was working on. I was told they were experiencing some delays, but they would update the forums periodically with the update.

It was a beautiful Saturday, and I needed a break. I came back that afternoon, and the forum was updated that the migration was delayed but we could expect it to complete very soon. No problem for me, I can catch up my emails on Sunday.

Sunday morning came, and mail was still down, and no update on the forums, so I open another ticket requesting an update on the forums. I received a very unprofessional response that they were working on the issue, and they didn't have time to provide constant updates regarding the status. Twelve hours since the last update didn't seem that "constant", so I explained that as inconvenienced as they were having their customers want to know when service would be restored, we as customers were a bit inconvenienced as well. The sarcasm sadly was lost on him, as he responded it wasn't an inconvenience for HIM.

Monday came, and that three hour unannounced outage was still going on. I decided to try their online support chat to see what the ETA would be, as I had lost a day's work already and was looking at losing another one. Below is the output of that chat:

Note the times of his response. I hadn't even had a chance to ask my question. I actually was going to ask about the status, but I also had a couple of other questions such as "would I get the emails from the weekend?" so I would know if I needed to request my clients re-send anything. Atiq basically connected to chat, blurted out his answer (without knowing my questions) and then hung up.

That was the last straw for me. I actually could have lived with the outage. Things happen. I've been doing this way too long to know sometimes the best planning (and I will assume they had the best planning) something can go wrong. What I won't tolerate is bad service (the chat window) and poor communication (the lack of updates that seem to inconvenience them). Yes, it's inexpensive hosting, but there is a certain amount of professionalism and support which is required even at that level.

So while I may be just one customer, taking my business elsewhere won't make much difference to their bottom line directly. I can let people know my experience so they can judge for themselves if this is the kind of service and support they expect from their hosting provider. If a few people read this and go elsewhere, then that's something more. If ASPNIx reads this and improves their service, even better.