Web Hosting Woes

“How a web host company can destroy your business in 5 minutes flat” was an article I read a while ago on the SitePoint Tribune. I thought to myself, aren’t I lucky to have found a hosting company that responds to my emails, gives reasonably prompt support and is relatively cheap. Alas, a few months later I have a bitter taste in my mounth!

The hosting company in question used to always automatically debit my credit card to take payment. They would send me an invoice a month before and all I would need to do was nothing. How wrong was I. They had an expired card number and failed to notify me of this fact, or indeed ask me to provide a new one, so I was blissfully unaware that they would kill the service. When I browsed to my blog URL, I was presented with this rather colourful page:

My reaction, as you can imagine, involved a few choice words which were equally colourful!

The site was down for four long days as the incident happened over a bank holiday weekend. This is a harsh lesson to learn, but now I will never have absolute faith in any hosting company, although it was naive for me to even expect a good service.