When the COOKIEHOST crumbles

I’ve made some change to the website lately; a lot of them actually. This is in an effort to drive more traffic to my website. In the lst two weeks have have put plenty of time in to it and to be perfectly honest it’s WordPress and some plug-ins; nothing fancy, but it’s taken some time.

So this is the story of where I was, what transpired and where I’m trying to go.

Lighting the Stage
A couple months ago I completely revamped my website, I canned all the old stuff and started a new with new hosting and WordPress. I had this idea in my head about starting off slow. The concept was if it was slow to rise, I don’t need to spend a lot on hosting; I need to see how it goes and then throttle out when things got busy(‘r).

My choice was COOKIEHOST. COOKIEHOST is the cheapest hosting service I could find at $40 a year and then there was a 50% off coupon for new accounts. That was $20 for hosting the first year. How bad can it be right? Hosting is hosting – yeah, yeah – for those who know, stop laughing.

At first I think everything was fine. From time to time the site would be down, it would be slow and others was just a simple WTF? Time passes.

Action and Reaction
It’s been about 6 months, COOKIEHOST is starting to show it’s colors. The site is down more often, it’s slow the support guys don’t respond to your emails or inquiries. You get the feeling the operation is being ran out of someone’s spare bedroom; in they’re spare time- remotely.

3 days ago, things were looking good for me. My stats were going up, my traffic was up, the website was looking good and being formed to a shape I liked. There’s a lot of tweaking for WordPress and PHP when you want something specific [if you don’t know PHP]. It was 11pm and I was tired and I was wrapping up some stuff for the day and I had just mentioned to my wife how I think things were coming along nicely. I emailed everyone I knew; told them to check out my site and let me know what’s going on and test it for me- get me some feedback.

It’s always that time. The time when you give your car a compliment or tell someone they’re doing a great job that is when the crap hits the fan. Yeah, you know.

In the morning I wake to a website that now had 40k+ hits on the website. My first thought was wow, let’s take a look at ADSENSE; nothing really new. I also noticed when I tried to access my site I was getting database errors.

But I had to get to work; zoom off I went. I checked my stats when I got to work and I was at 50k+ visits and the database was still going down and then shortly after I get a ‘your hosting has been suspended – contact billing’. I’m thinking holy crap! What happened?

I emailed the COOKIEHOST guys [cause you can’t contact them any other way]. There is no phone number for the billing department or support. It’s completely disturbing.

So now all the emails I sent out to test my website are coming in. they see the suspension on the website; what a completely embarrassing thing to deal with AND I had just submitted a couple of stories to the BLOG publishers. What are they going to think now?! Humiliating. It’s awful.

The emails keep going to COOKIEHOST, their responses are cryptic at best. They keep giving me information about my site saying it’s crashing their entire web server. One website is doing this. As I know they’re working on my website, I keep checking back to back to see if there’s status; maybe catch it before they can email me- may be get lucky. But I was actually far from it.

COOKIEHOST kept saying it’s ‘a problem with your site, we’re looking in to it.’ and would never say specifically what the problem was or offering any solutions to resolve the issue.

My thing is that when you offer a problem, you should offer a solution or suggestion in the same message; they wouldn’t do this. They would sent out emails, I’d ask questions and they would never answer the questions. I’d offer a suggestion and no response. I offered my system backups and my database backups and they never answered. I told them to use the tape backup from their most recent backup and I’d handle the rest; NO RESPONSE.

I finally get something back from them that basically every time we place your website online it crashes our server. You may need to find new hosting. Eff’n what?

They have ignored me [my suggestions] all this time and now they’re telling me I may need new hosting.

I’m still at work. I’m fuming from this ordeal. The responses are coming about 1 and hour or more than an hour at times. 8 emails is like all day. I’m so mad at them I could spit, but there’s nothing I can do.

In a surprising move they want me to provide a recent database backup and a current system backup [that I offered earlier]. I had completely backed up my database and site on my own accord to deal with just a situation like this.

So, willing to get things going, I agreed to upload all this.

When I left work, it’s was still a saga in motion. I got home and jumped on uploading the files, folders- everything I had download from the ROOT folder of the website. 196mb takes a long time to upload. But unfortunately I couldn’t over write some files, some sort of permissions problem.

Oh the pain of it all!

It’s getting late in to the day. It’s been 15 hours since we started this little fun trip in to BS and delays. I was done. I was mad. I was not in the mood to deal with lacksadaical techs and crappy service and apparent people who have thought about doing backups regularly.

I sent an email round 11pm. I tell COOKIEHOST that basically, I’m the customer, I paid for hosting service, they should have a recent backup, I want them to use it and I don’t care what words they use to communicate it again, but I wanted my website back up, online and viewable to the public.

The next morning, I’ve an email waiting for me. COOKIEHOST basically tells me the website back up, restored from ‘last weeks’ tape backup and if they have any more problems from my website, I need to find new hosting.

Resolution
While I was happy that the website was backup, but on the same token, I was very displeased with COOKIEHOST and them telling me ‘another problem and your gone’ resolution didn’t sit well with me at all. It was just a eating feeling. I thought their responses were curt at every point and offered nothing constructive. They never told me what the issue was and the bigger issue was that my site, my one little site, took down their entire webhosting system. That places a lot of doubt on their whole operation.

I already had my domains with GoDaddy and everytime I’ve called them it’s less than 4 minutes to actually talk to a live, honest to god, person.

Yeah, so I called’m and in less than a day and very little in the way of difficultly I had my hosting switched from COOKIEHOST to GoDaddy. GoDaddy said the hosting would/could take 12 hours, done in an hour. They said setting up WordPress would take and hour, done in 15 minutes and they said transferring/activating my domain would take 24hrs; it was done in 1 hr. It was very refreshing.

As you can see the site is up, it’s working, it’s actually faster and I’m confident that if something goes wrong they keep backups on a daily basis; I checked. Yeah, I’m paying more for hosting, but now I’m getting service. If I had a commerce site and I was down 15 hours I think it would’ve been a much bigger event and COOKIEHOST would’ve cared less.

Conclusion
What you need to take away from this, and it’s really not anything new in the way of advice, but you get what you pay for.

Thanks for reading!

Enjoy.