web hosting is a funny animal.

Not long ago I changed my hosting provider – I consider myself a pretty loyal customer if I feel I am getting value for money and have always believed it is a mistake to go cheap for any service, hosting or otherwise, or to use price solely as the criteria that drives your purchasing decisions.

I hosted my sites with Kiosk.ws, Now GVO, for a good number of years and I documented my reasons for migrating to an alternative service elsewhere on this site. It was not a decision I took lightly for a number of reasons but I found a service that fulfilled all my needs and seemed ideal.

When I first approached MK Hosting USA they responded positively and promptly and my experience at the point of sale certainly seemed to reinforce the good things I had read about them.  Their services and helpful attitude along with the responsiveness of their help desk persuaded me to make the move and for the first few months the service was very impressive – fast load times, very reliable with zero downtime and the email marketing and autoresponder services were a gem.

You could say I was patting myself on the back for making what seemed to be a pretty smart move!

Unfortunately, nothing good lasts forever, or in this case for much more than four months. Long story short, one evening a couple of weeks ago I was editing my sites and making backups of all the recent work I had been doing on this domain and suddenly, everything went a.w.o.l.

I could not access my sites or my admin areas in WordPress or Nucleus – everything had gone down. I’m not one to panic so I logged into cpanel and checked the service status and was confronted with a lot of red x’s. Still not overly concerned I logged in and submitted a support ticket, but I received no confirmation as is the norm. I waited and waited and as my past experience of support has been so good, started to get a bit peeved after a few hours with no response.

Eventually, after 24 and then 48 hours with not even a whisper from the company despite numerous and varied attempts to contact them, I was unhappier than a very unhappy thing. I could see what was causing the problems – a full partition on the server which was bringing down all database driven sites – even their own support desk, members area and billing area. Emails sent to all their contact addresses began bouncing. It was apparent that there was nobody minding the store, nobody at the helm and little evidence that it was going to change anytime soon. I tried to raise someone’s interest through their twitter account, obviously unmonitored, and started a thread on Web Hosting Talk – most good hosts monitor those boards for discussions pertaining to their companies – obviously not MK Hosting USA however.

Throughout this downtime I was desperately trying to secure backups because that was exactly what I had been doing before the server crashed – unfortunately, the problems were preventing me from doing so. You can read the full story over on the Web Hosting Talk thread about MK Hosting USA. After several attempts I did eventually manage to grab a working backup but it was a hugely frustrating experience and at the time of writing the issues have still not been permanently fixed and no, I have not heard a whisper from the company in any form.

So, the upshot of all this is that we have moved to Knownhost on a shiny new VPS.

I apologize to anyone who tried to visit in the past two weeks – it took that long to get a working backup and even then, it was sheer luck. I pity any customers who didn’t grab one of the two pretty short windows to secure their data.

The positive things that occurred during these two weeks – the owners of the server, Hostgator, went above and beyond the call of duty to try and provide me with backups of my database files that were not corrupt. I was very impressed with their willingness to try to help a customer, and not even one of their own, in the face of insurmountable difficulties due to the complete absence of service from another provider. This is exactly why Hostgator are at the top of the game and have a solid reputation by and large. Thanks and good karma to the techs at Hostgator who answered my call.

And so to Knownhost – I first became aware of them through a video post by Mark at 45n5.com and then subsequently through various forums where customers had little but praise for them. So far, that has been borne out entirely in my dealings with them. They answer tickets blazingly fast and are extremely tolerant of even the most basic questions – polite, helpful and very responsive.

Running my own server is a whole new kettle of fish but to be honest, I am very confident that I have chosen an excellent company to work with and the prices for their managed VPS plans are extremely good.

Now, you may still encounter a few minor problems on the sites, but that is probably due to me and the fact that some adjustments will be needed in light of a new server configuration – please let me know if you do encounter any broken bits.

For all my email subscribers – the most painful loss to me is the services I was using to manage all my autoresponders and email lists. This is going to take time to replace but I have a few options to explore and you may not hear from me for a while. However, list facilities will be restored and if you are already on one of my lists, you won’t need to resubscribe as whatever route I choose to go, it will be one where I can import all my existing list members without inconveniencing them.

I will be removing recommendations for MK Hosting USA – technical issues are one thing but total breakdown of support and evidence that the server simply ceased to be monitored is more than enough reason to stay well clear. I’m immensely relieved to have recovered my sites but it should not have taken two weeks to do so and certainly should not have been the hit and miss affair that it was due to their total failure to respond to paying customers. When a company doesn’t even attempt to offer an excuse or explanation, it’s time to take your business elsewhere.

Sorry, but I’m terribly disappointed in what looked to be such a promising service and can’t understand how they went from so good to so awful almost overnight. It’s another cautionary tale…….

I would love to hear from someone at MK Hosting USA  who might be able to shed some light on how such an epic failure was allowed to occur – I mean, there might even be some incredibly valid mitigating circumstances, but until someone steps up to the plate, all I can assume is that they are in meltdown and will disappear along with all their customers’ data in the not too distant future.

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