I hope very much that I am at the end of a 2 week search for a backup reseller hosting account. The reseller account that most of you are in (for those I host) is moderately large, but I have reached a stage where I need alternative hosting so I can spread the sites across different locations and have another independent location if problems are detected in the primary hosting. I am also seeking a reseller hosting package with the data centre based in the UK, this would offer a marginally faster response time than the US based hosting I am currently using.
One might reasonably assume that this is fairly easy to do. However it did not turn out that way.
Hosting Company #1
I located and took out a reseller hosting package with Hosting Company #1, paid the fees for 1 year and tried to use the hosting. I could not get in, I had messages about fraud on my account, it took several support calls to get it sorted out with the reassuring message; “oh, that always happens ignore it”. This is when the warning bells start to ring. Eventually I get it sorted out but by this time the “we will get you up and running in 10 minutes”, had become several hours.
By this time I can see a worrying trend, the company who appears to be moderately large, are actually very small. You cannot really tell via the web. I suspect that they may have owned some servers in a data centre but they were certainly not tier one provider.
For me to check the hosting I have to upload a WordPress website to see if it can be installed easily. I have processes I use, and some of these I share with you. The one I tried in this case used UpDraftPlus which is a premium plugin I have installed on some sites which automatically backs up sites. In this case it worked, so, so far, so good. On closer inspection I notice that the memory allocated per website is not as large as the current host we all use today.
Meanwhile, and unrelated; one of my existing clients contacted me with a problem: The organisation is based in two locations. One uses a County Council network and DropBox is blocked by IT, can I help? They wish to keep core files in a central location so both offices can get to them. I start to explore the new hosting package to see if I can resolve it. I find a solution, install it and spend the next 4 hours trying to get it to work. Eventually I find that the application cannot run on the hosting because the hosting company has blocked some of the services it requires to function. What a waste of time!
I then contact support to ask some questions, but support is not very responsive. Of course this is a reflection of a small company. If a critical request takes over 24hrs to solicit a response then it is time to look somewhere else.
So I cancel and begin the search again.
Hosting Company #2
I have used a company in London over the years for my private email address. At one point I had a single website with them, and they hosted my email. I got back in touch with them. Yes they could provide a reseller hosting account. To reduce costs I took out a 2yr contract with them. In this case I know they are quite large (and expensive). Here I hit problem 1. I cannot access the account. They cannot access the account either. It should have been all automatic. 30 hours and several support calls later we find out why. Their automated system (all of these companies use automated account set up) had opened the new reseller account based on my surname. However an account already existed with that name so there was a conflict. Ironically, this old account was mine too, because I tried them out last July prior to moving everyone. At that time Duplicator (another backup and restore solution) simply would not work in their hosting. I found out why, and for that reason I walked away. However the company did not delete the hosting package, they just left it there.
Warning bells start to ring again. That is not very professional to leave an old account in hosting when the customer has cancelled it. Nobody seems to be too bothered about it. I eventually get access to the hosting around 36 hours later. Along with an old website and file structure I left there 8 months ago.
I set it up and upload a new site and install it. It works ok using UpDraftPlus which is reassuring. Everything is looking ok. So next I try to copy over one of my larger sites to see if that works ok. This one is over 300MB and receives 2000 hits per month and is moderately active. This time the restore mechanism fails. UpDraftPlus reports some odd errors. The last thing I need is a restore mechanism that “may” work. I need to know it will work.
Further investigation shows that parameters in the hosting are locked down, this is not unusual, but the parameters that are locked down are doing two things: the first is that there is little processing capacity for background tasks. The second is there is a time limit of 30 seconds on the background tasks. Having the time limit is not unusual, however setting the priority to very low means that everything initiated through the hosting takes forever to happen.
An example of this, which I provided back to hosting company #2 is; based on our current hosting, I can install a clean (empty) wordpress shell in 5 seconds. In hosting company #2 it takes over a minute. There are other things I can see which also indicate if you try to do anything moderately ambitious in the hosting it is highly likely that it will time out and the process will be cancelled.
Another support call (one of around 5 that went back and forth) the Tech Support team are not bothered about this it is “normal”. They all seem to be pretty complacent about their product. I have seen this many times before, both in this world and the former international commercial world I used to occupy a few years back. It generally heralds a train wreck in the future, when the competition comes along and provides a superior service and takes their customers away.
So I cancel this account and move on.
Hosting Company #3
While trying to establish why UpdraftPlus did not work consistently at the last hosting company, I contact the author and we have an exchange of mails. I am pretty sure that the problem is not in the application at all, but with the hosting company. During our exchange I comment on the issues I have experienced. He recommends Hosting Company #3.
I write this with my fingers and legs crossed because so far it is looking ok. I took out the account, it was installed and up and running in 20 minutes. Tech Support and Sales support is quite responsive, but more importantly pro-active.
I install a couple of sites and these all work ok. I have Eastern European support, and the data centre is in London. Memory allocation for the website is good, the processing bandwidth is not strangled.
I will continue to test this over the next two weeks.
Conclusion
I have dealt with around 6 of these companies over the past three years. From a commercial perspective I can appreciate that I am not spending £5000 per year, and therefore I cannot reasonably expect an extremely responsive or knowledgeable support organisation. However it is a utility that is being provided. It should just work.
In these cases it did not for various reasons. I am not an “expert” on this, however intuitively I would expect WordPress to run and be able to be backed up and restored without any issues. After all it is used on around 60 million sites around the world.
In most of these cases, the first level of technical support does not know very much, and will give you stock answers to questions rather than understand the problem. When things get escalated to the second level, there is an attitude like “trust me I am a doctor”. While these people are generally very good, there are also some that cannot see an issue, or offer the advice “oh, I would not do it like that.” Despite the fact that you are following a process with your current hosting company that works, but needs special modification for the prospective hosting company.
There is a lot to be desired here, some are better than others. I did consider the current hosting company based in the US as perfect in July 2014. Support were really good and based with the hosting company, not outsourced. Management cared about how they looked after customers. Hosting memory, processing bandwidth and performance were all very good. They could do no wrong.
That is until a site was hacked in September 2014. I had just installed it. A group of hackers defaced the site. Then followed two other occasions over the next 5 months where newly installed sites were in the process of being hacked as I was installing them. In these cases I had figured out the sequence of events and knew how to stop it from happening. Extensive and escalated support threads provided no satisfaction, or answers on how it was possible for a clean site to be hacked within minutes of it being installed. While I cannot prove it, and the hosting company in question will not admit it (for obvious reasons) we have reached an impasse.
I suspect that the hack originates from somewhere within the hosting company and outside of my control (possibly from another account). I have been put into a position that to prove this I needed to locate another hosting company and repeat the process there with the same sites, same software. If it does not happen again, then it was something in the original hosting company causing the problem.
Prior to July 2014 we were all somewhere else. There were never any security issues there at all. However there were technical problems with poor website performance as seen in the UK. It was this that initiated the move in July 2014.
It was largely due to my security concerns with the current hosting provider that we now have a second hosting company set up in parallel. Over the next six months I may move everyone across to the new hosting company, or run the two in parallel. The important point to make here is a lot more capacity is available now. Should any issues arise in the current hosting, they can be tested in the new hosting and moved if necessary. So we have a backup plan that is not dependent on a single source hosting partner.
After all it is never a good idea to have all of your eggs in one basket.