It’s a sad week (well, two weeks) for web hosts. First, the company with which I have been a customer for over 2 years encountered issues after migrating to a new datacenter; these problems broke a number of my sites and caused me unending headaches. Then DreamHost, which hosts this blog and a number of other sites, had to perform network hardware maintenance, which was followed by sporadic periods of network failures. Finally, today I received an e-mail saying that the first company was shutting down in January and that I’d need to find a new place to host those sites.

What happened? Why do I feel like the Internet is collapsing? Aiya!

I’m really disappointed. I’d always had uptime of over 99.96% with the first company and amazing pricing (okay, now that they’re shutting down I can reveal that I’ve been using ResellerScene). I used their reseller services to host over a dozen web sites on independent cPanel accounts.

(Begin nerdy section)
Earlier this month, they moved to new server setups; apparently the new servers are virtualized—it’s pretty obvious when WHM says the server runs on Xen. Code that had worked for years broke down because of new PHP security settings, misconfiguration of PHP as an Apache module, and file permission errors. Their help desk was really helpful because they quickly moved to PHP-CGI, which helped with permission errors and custom configuration, but which broke more things as a result of php_flag and php_value declarations in .htaccess files.
(End nerdy section)

Those were the first signs of trouble.

I didn’t immediately switch hosts. I had been a customer for more than 2 years and support was always quick and helpful. Then there were the awesome discounts I’ve been enjoying because I signed up as customer #6, before prices went up.

Today, I got a sad e-mail which began as follows:

I regret to inform you that due to financial instability, ResellerScene LLC will be going out of business. Due to the economic downturn, ResellerScene operations have greatly slowed down and it no longer seems viable for ResellerScene to continue.

I now have just over a month to migrate my dozen sites (and client sites) to some new host. Some I can move to DreamHost, but I’ll need to find another cPanel reseller service for some of the client sites.

*sigh*. Life sucks.

As for DreamHost, their services are awesome: great balance of features and price. Over the past year, I’ve been able to set up my custom-compiled PHP installation, use up gigabytes of storage and run important sites without much downtime. It’s a service I’d recommend to anyone… seriously! But I can’t get over the fact that they’ve had so many network failures in the past few days.

It’s not like DreamHost’s shutting down. Yet. But the downtime makes me wary of migrating my old sites to DreamHost, at least until they resolve these issues.

Now I have a headache. Thinking about migrating a dozen sites without breaking anything. Gotta go drink some tea… listen to some music… relax. Relax, relax, relax!

What do I do?!

I need your input. Let me know (@FrederickDing) of any (reliable!) and reasonably-priced web hosts with good reputations. Most importantly, I need to find a place where I can host client sites and provide them with control panel access.