I have seen the overlooking hosting problem over and over as the years have gone by, but was recently reminded of this. The first time I saw this problem was when we worked on a project with a local marketing firm for a company that has a fairly large National brand that sells their product heavily during the holiday season. The marketing firm we were working with recommended a $5/month “unlimited” hosting solution to the client, despite our arguments against it, after they had just paid top dollar for a premium website.
Here’s what happened. Every Saturday morning for a month the site shut down. When we called the hosting company, we were put on hold to talk with someone, like that credit card commercial where the man says “This is Peggy.” We were told there was an out of control script running. After multiple weekends we finally got them to tell us what the script was. It was the index.php file which is their homepage. So apparently the hosting company promised unlimited hosting, but had a cap on CPU usage and when people came in droves to the site on the weekend to get information on their product, it shut the site down. We’ve seen this over and over with only slight variations to the story. continue reading “Don’t Overlook Hosting”
