How much of my life's been wasted dealing with problems caused by shared Web hosting hassles? I wish I could put a dollar value on it and collect it from the dozen or so companies that have promised me the world but delivered a minimally functional service that ultimately I cannot use. I'll tell you about some of the hassles I've endured, but if you just want some quick advice, all I can say is this: Never use shared Web hosting for anything remotely important.
The most recent debacle happened yesterday, when the horrible shared hosting company that served up our JEM Electronic Media corporate site, our ad server, and our survey program, decided to spontaneously suspend our account due to resource over-usage. We have 250GB of transfer bandwidth to use every month, and we have never, on our best months, gone beyond 4GB of it. So imagine my surprise when I saw this warning message. I spent an hour and 15 minutes on hold before giving up on the support department and sending an email to ask that my account be cancelled. I found out later that the overusage had nothing to do with our shared account -- someone else that had a shared account on the server was abusing it, but all of the customers on that server had to suffer for it.
Desperate to get our ads back online, I started an account with Verio, a Linux- and BSD-friendly hosting company I was familiar with from some interviews I did at SCALE 5x. It cost three times as much for the same level of hosting service, but promised better customer support and easier site management. I prepaid for a month, uploaded all of our site files, and configured our email accounts. Then I hit the wall -- there was no way to upload our 14MB MySQL database. I had an SQL dump, which I usually upload from the command line, but Verio did not allow OpenSSH or remote MySQL access on my level of service. For that, I would have to pay another $10 per month, which brought the cost up to more than four times what I was paying at Omnis. Verio did have a tech support person on hand to talk to me immediately, but she said that the only way around the problem was to use a Web program to upload the SQL file, or upgrade the account. Verio provides phpMyAdmin, but that has a 2MB query limit -- far short of the 14MB I needed. The tech told me that there were probably other programs I could use, but they were all for Windows. Having again spent way too much time messing with stupid limitations and technicalities, I asked to cancel my account. Unfortunately, Verio only has tech support people working on Labor Day -- no customer support people -- so I'd have to call back another day. It turns out I didn't have to, because a very friendly man from Verio called me today to ask how he could help sell me some extra business services that I didn't need. I wish I'd recorded the call, because the dramatic change from superficial friendliness to disgust and disinterest was comical when I told him I wanted to cancel my account.
These are only the latest nightmares from the land of shared hosting. I've been through it all with other shared hosts that Netcraft has consistently given top reliability ratings to. iPowerWeb had a "too good to be true" hosting plan, but our Web server went through between two and four hours of weekly downtime for reasons unrelated to the software we were running. HostNuke rudely told me that I could not run my own mail server because they didn't want their customers spamming people. There are a bunch I don't remember the names of, all of which were unreliable or offered "unmetered" bandwidth with hidden limitations. I went with one company that had an OpenBSD shared host, but the hardware was so weak that the traffic from one of my articles making it to the front page of OSNews brought it to its knees. I hosted on one shared server that seemed perfect, until one of the other people I shared the server with decided to send out spam, which resulted in our shared SMTP server being banned, and the hosting company refused to move me to another server to remedy the problem.
After the Verio disaster, I ended up moving our corporate site and database over to our main server where the rest of our sites are. I would prefer to have the ads and surveys on a separate server, but it's just not going to work right now. Presently I'm waiting for the DNS cache to switch to our name servers. This means we've been without ads for more than a full day, all because of bad service from shared hosting. I had great experiences with a rented server from SevenL, and someday I hope we make enough money as a company to farm out all of our hosting to a customer-centric company like Rackspace, but for now, the only host I can both trust and afford is myself.
Two-minute stories 
