Growing Pains: I’m Looking for New Hosting

I am not a very happy camper right now. After months of downtime on my site and email with Surpass Hosting, they finally determined that they needed to switch my shared server to another machine. I received an email notifying me that they found another location for my site and all I had to do was email them when I wanted to make the switch. Because changing servers requires more downtime with the site and with emails, I wanted this to be done either during the weekend or late at night.

So, to my surprise, I received an email yesterday from Surpass notifying me that my server had been changed and I would need to change my nameservers with my domain provider (Godaddy). I immediately went to my site and it was running smoothly so I thanked Surpass publicly on Twitter for assisting me.

And then it happened…

I tried to log in to my WordPress to look at the “back-end” and only half of it would load—I couldn’t post anything or look at any posts.

Of course I went into panic mode.

I was told by Surpass that it would take hours for my site to propagate to the new nameserver but I had a bad feeling about not being able to see my WordPress.

After about six hours of worry and no help from Surpass (other than what appeared to be pre-written responses—they don’t have live customer service), I found out that one of my plug-ins contributed to the issue. Me and my significant other who is a whiz at stuff like this, deleted all of the plug-ins and re-added them one by one until we found the culprit. This was not Surpass’ problem but I have two issues:

1. They did not wait until I gave them the go ahead to move my site, the site I pay them money for. Doing a huge move like that in the middle of the day when traffic is at its peak is not good business. I did not tell them to move me and they went ahead and did it anyway, wrecking havoc on my site.
2. I had to literally scream and shout on Twitter to get someone at Surpass to answer my questions. I do not like the fact that they don’t have a tech line you can call. I understand they just installed a “Live chat” option, but it is very hard to find on their website. I am not thrilled.

So suffice to say, I may be leaving Surpass. They were great at the beginning, but I feel that I need more individualized customer support, especially when I am paying my hard earned money.

It’s official—your girl in the “cube” is looking for new hosting. If you know of a good company that is reliable and has phone as well as online technical support, please let me know!