Long story all,<br /><br />Basically a few months ago, my host was taken over by another company. This 'company' has got a very lets say 'checkered' background. I won't mention names publically, but please PM me I am happy to tell you.<br /><br />Anyway Dave Bate and I discussed at length and we decided to stay put. I don't know how many of you have ever run or hosted web sites, but they are a lot of work and moving them is a nightmare.<br /><br />You often swap platforms, so things like forums and any scripts all 'break' as absolute paths on the server change.<br /><br />Not to mention with 'shared' hosting you never get root access, and usually no shell access so getting paths to perl, php, cgi is painful. Also debugging scripts without shell is like mission impossible you have to schedule the script, wait for it to run, and then try to figure out why it did not work and try again. Also there is a limit on resources, use too much and get the account suspended for 24 hours.<br /><br />Anyway we moved (when it first broke) took me a few hours to get it going. Then their stupid migration broke, so basically we were all on the new server, but SQL was on the old server. So every day it ran again wiping off my fixes so back I would fix it again. Took me 3 days to get it fully swapped over.<br /><br />Next all my TLE scripts broke and automatic mailing NEVER worked. So I was doing manual mailing. On the old shared host, for my 700 member email list, it would take about 9 minutes. On their wonderful new platform 1 day 7 hours 56 mins average! I send out emails every 24 hours. So I am sending them faster than they can be delivered.....<br /><br />So I had enough, time to get a new place to go to and lets look at dedicated server. This is a server that is exclusive to one client.<br /><br />Signed up with another company 'un-named' PM me again if you want to know who to avoid. So it was promised to be set up in under 24 hours. 2 days later turning to 3 it came on. I should have taken that omen as the future, but oh well....<br /><br />I got the forum up and most basic features (web sites and email) then it went down. I had a fault ticket in for 48 hours!! No feedback, I would chase the ticket and get simply 'you will be emailed when its fixed' Okay enough I called them on last Saturday morning (US Friday afternoon), I told them you have to 17:00 (5PM) to get this up else I cancel. It comes with a 30 day full refund, not to mention its on my Amex and they stand behind you.<br /><br />I called up and ended up getting connected to the VP of finance. He was very sorry and said it would be up today (Friday) without fail. It was already 1600 (4PM) and he said I will call you in 15 minutes to give you the excat time of restoration. I WILL CALL YOU, heard this over and over.<br /><br />I waited until 5 PM (45 minutes overdue - and yes NO call) cancelled and got my cancellation ticket.<br /><br />Signed up Saturday afternoon and my about Midnight Saturday here (was around 6 to 7 hours after I purchased the server was UP) so around 12 hours later had the forum and sites back up.<br /><br />Its now Wednesday at 21:00 and I got everything fixed. All the TLE scripts, automatic maillists, everything.<br /><br />Its 3 days to the Shuttle launch not bad timing.<br /><br />Anyway there is what happened. While you were all trying to get the site, either getting nothing or sometimes got the site on different IPs you know a bit of the hassle I went through.<br /><br />I spent the entire weekend rebuilding and getting everything up, from about 7 am to 2am<br /><br />I feel quite happy for what I went through, and if it was not for having downtime and selecting that terrible dedicated server host (it turns out they outsource) most of you would have not seen anything wrong apart from the posts that kept disappearing from the migration stuff up of my previous shared host.<br /><br />Enjoy - I hope you all like it. Anyone interested in hosting sites let me know I have heaps of resources, disc space, etc.