I just wanted to say a quick Merry Christmas to my favorite Hosting Company.  They have made me biased towards their services by providing very good service and especially customer support.

Last spring I started chronicling the change in policy at IPower that resulted in thousands of customers getting slammed into domain name renewals at a total cost that was more than twice what they originally signed up for.

They did this by taking a previously free service and charging as much for it as they did for the core service of domain name renewal.

Today, I ran into an incident with my own preferred domain hosting company, InMotion Hosting.

I recently ordered a new domain at something-about-harry.com.  About 3 days after ordering, I received a bill and automatic debit from my credit card from InMotion for Domain Privacy protection, for a charge of $5 ($4 less than IPower).

Unlike IPower, which made this a policy and a more expensive policy at that.  InMotion had simply made a billing mistake.

They not only removed the service at my request (something IPOWER will not do after the fact if you are right or wong), but they credited my card for $5 for the service I did not buy (again something IPower will not do under any circumstance after the charge).  Plus, InMotion even offered to give me a free month on my plan (which I declined as it was not really needed for a domain name registration).

The point is that all of these things that IPower makes part of their policy where the customer is penalized, even when the customer is right, InMotion does not make it policy and fixes their mistakes such that the customer is made whole or better!

Now, given the fact that we are heading into a recession and possibly a depression, you have to wonder if a business that is running on unsound policies and practices, can actually survive.  Its not like they are bloated with useless fat and services, looking to cut the extra expenses like a chronic dieter picking up Anoretix from Oprah, but they actually have self destructive policies and marketing strategies that is sabotaging their core customers from go.

Something ultimately has to give, and it is probably going to be weaker companies that fail to execute like IPower….

 In MotionHosting offers great services for those who may be looking for an inexpensive option. With a wide variety of hosting options, customers have the ability to pick and choose various programs tailored to their specific needs. Finding a solid hosting service doesn’t need to be as stressful as combing the internet for mortgage quotes. 

Many of InMotionHosting’s services offer some great options, with their “Value Class” hosting the most cost-effective and beneficial for those just entering the industry. Offering 2 stage Spam Protection, 2MB Attachment Size, weekly backups and a 2 year prepay option with a 30 day money back guarantee, the Value Class option through InMotionHosting offers solid services for a charge of $3 per month. 

I used to pick up domains from the cheaper source possible.  Later when I was ready to develop a domain name into a site, I’d then turn to InMotion Hosting for my hosting and redirect the domain from wherever over to InMotion Hosting.

That worked great for several years and I saved a lot of money.  But over the last year or so, those great domain deals are not as good.  Even worse the hassle of dealing with the companies that offer them is just not worth it.

So the other day, when I needed to pick up a single domain for a future project, I turned to InMotion Hosting.  The price isn’t too bad, just $7.95 per year, which is only just a little more than what I’d pay about anywhere else these days.

Buying just a domain there is not exactly easy.  In fact they almost seem to discourage it.

Its buried at the bottom of this page, that tries to up-sell a hosting plan (which is in fact a good deal).

Once you get that far, you still have 2 more screens to click through, a car cover to remove and you have to dance a jig underwater before you actually see the price is $7.95. 

But hey, I understand that.  Their just trying to turn off domainers.  Each unto their own I guess.

They do have great deals on hosting, and that deal is a lot sweeter when you experience their awesome tech support, which makes their prices look like their free. 

Business Class Hosting by InMotion Hosting Plans Starting at Just $6.95/mo • Unlimited Disk Space • Unlimited Data Transfer • 90 Day Money Back Guarantee • True 24/7 Support Rated 3 Out of 3 Stars by CNET.com!

I have an update to my earlier article titled, “The Odd Complaint About InMotion Hosting “.  I’ve been continuing to work for by power through the weekend, and we’ve been making a little bit of progress identifying the potential source of the problem that caused my servers crash throughout the week last week.  Identify the solution has enabled me to see that a good chunk of the issue is not directly related to InMotion Hosting.

The problem that I seem to be having, seems to stem from an incompatibility and the latest version of WordPress 2.3 .3 and some legacy plug-ins that I’ve been using that previously had no difficulties with.  The plug-ins work just fine with older versions of WordPress does seem to be slightly incompatible with the new versions of Word press and essentially are calling on database tables that are no longer in WordPress.  This triggered errors on the domains that were running them and those errors increase the RAM utilization on the servers that I was using.

A very helpful person that InMotion Hosting was able to identify this by looking at my error logs.  I could not look at the error logs myself because they have been the lead in for my views and so I was unable to get in and troubleshoot this problem myself.  I’ve no idea how they are logs were deleted but I have a feeling it happened when they did some work on my server and possibly during the reboot process or something.

But the good news is we were able to find some potential source of the problem and since then I have been busy getting updates to the plug-ins that needed them so that I won’t have this problem on my server.

The bad news is, I have no way to monitor brand utilization history through my account at InMotion.  I can go and I can take a glance at what the regular location is at any given point in time, but if granules nation is not out of control at that particular point in time (something not happening that would trigger an error at that specific moment) but I cannot see that there’s a problem it is to be fixed still.

In defense of InMotion, their service is not include the ability to monitor the RAM on their own servers.  They seem to recommend that I should go out and find software that will do this myself.  I would contend that if I find software like that still not the software that they use in so we are then going to be comparing apples to oranges in their own view will rule the day and possibly shut down the server when I exceed the limits that I’m allowed.  So I still have a small complaint with them in that they don’t provide an answer to this solution is specially as regularization is key to their virtual Private server solutions.  It seems to me that if you’re going to have a metric that you track and bill upon, then you should enable your customers to see what you’re tracking.  It’s somewhat a can to having a cell phone wireless plan without being able to view the minutes that you’ve used yourself on the phone or even on a bill!

So if anyone out there has run into this problem themselves and found some good tracking software to install at the server level (preferably something that’s free), please drop me a comment or an e-mail.  I’d be happy to reference you and provide a link to your own site if you can help me out with this.

In the meantime I have to get back to work now that the problem is solved and got a backlog of articles to write and a backlog of websites to create including one that I have no knowledge about all dealing with bodybuilding and some concept known as prohormones.  I’m not a bodybuilder and so I’m going to have to spend a lot of time doing some research on this one to figure out what this is all about. 

This week I have had a very strange experience with InMotion Hosting.  The strange experience with InMotion Hosting is that I have a complaint about their service.

I’ve been with them for several years and never had a complaint before (if you don’t count the time they turned off my hosting account without telling me when I had a memory hog wordpress plugin installed for a couple days).

This is a legitimate complaint.  Since last Friday my virtual server with Inmotion Hosting has been down, crashing or partially crashed about every other day.  From Friday until about Sunday, my email was not working.  I was taking the weekend off and only noticed that I was getting terribly much spam on my treo forwarded from one of my webmaster accounts.

When I checked in on things Sunday, I confirmed that the email server was definitely down and it was not a problem I could fix myself by restarting the email server and POP3 server.

Then a couple days later the email was down again and this time the database server which runs MySQL (and all of my blogs) was down plus, I could not access CPANEL on any of my accounts nor my server.

Today, one of my domains on the server (but not all) has the same problem.  No email, no database, no ftp, and no site up on the web.

The Complaint about InMotion Hosting

Here’s where I have a complaint.  I called to get the issue fixed.  Hold time this week has been in the 30 minute range, which is atypical as holdtime is normally in the 30 second range.  I waited to get someone for about 30 minutes.  When I finally got them, they could see that there was a problem, but they could not get tier 2 support to work on it.  That’s atypical as well. Normally Tier 1 can figure out a problem and if they do not have permission to do the fix, someone in tier 2 is ready and gets it done in minutes.

Today was different.  I was told that they were short staffed due to illness and my ticket would not be assigned for 30 minutes.  I could understand that as I get sick like anyone.

However 2 hours later my websites were still down and 3 hours later the whole thing went down including email and my primary domain.

When I called in at the 3 hour mark (when my site went nuclear), I was on hold for about 10 minutes again before I spoke with anyone.  By the time they got on the line, and researched my ticket, another 5 minutes, the site had come back up.

That was great, glad to have the site back up, but at this point I wanted some answers.  I had no information as to why my site had been down today or any other day and at this point my confidence in InMotion is severely shaken.  Things were looking ugly, (not IPower ugly) but too ugly to ignore.

So at this point, I’m now waiting for a written response from tier 2 as to what is causing the repeated down time on my server.  I need written because that is what the tier 1 rep recommended and apparently there were no Tier 2 reps handy to respond verbally and save everyone some time.

So now I sit back and wait and hope that my server stays up and wonder when I might respect a response as to what happened, and more importantly how the problem can be prevented in the future.  Its a weird thing having problems with InMotion.  I hope that this is isolated as I do not even want to think about having to make a move and find a hosting company that has been as good as Inmotion has been over the last few years.  Hopefully this is not the signal of a downturn.  I have looked on Orovo and several other areas for info on similar complaints, but come up short so far.

I have come to realize that almost every host will eventually experience some downtime.  A host can only build and so much redundancy before the trip will witching hour will develop and everything will go wrong and their servers or site or all of the above will crash.

My own preferred post and one that I do highly recommend experience the bandwidth outage last night for about an hour and a half.  Initially I wasn’t certain if my own DSL connection was down or preparing to go down or if my host was down.  Sometimes my DSL connection starts to waver, I’ll start to the experience patchy browsing experiences for lack of a better word.  A bill to open one site but not another and then a few minutes later everything will crash and I’ll have to go reboot my router for my modem or something or in bad situations called my DSL provider and said on the phone for an hour half.

Last night my host went down, and initially I thought they were down and then I thought maybe my DSL provider was going down.  So I lost a few cycles troubleshooting things internally to my own systems before I was able to determine that my host was actually down.

In the past I’ve experienced this type of issue a couple times before and usually my host came up before I was done doing all the troubleshooting on my side and I was never sure if they had truly been down or if it was just something in my head or my system.  Unfortunately, my host was truly down at all by websites and all my customers websites were down as well while they were down.  Fortunately that happened in the bill of the night and most of my sites and my customer sites receive the majority of their traffic from the Western Hemisphere and so we don’t lose a lot of business and is not going to slow down my ten year plan on buying a luxury home or anything like that.

I sent off an e-mail to my host your my Yahoo account because my own e-mail was down along with the servers and by websites. 

What’s my Point?  – Does your Host have 24/7 Phone support?

my host has excellent customer service.  They are widely recognized as having excellent customer service.  Their prices are not the cheapest in the industry, but most people flock to them for their customer service.  They’re not the most expensive either it’s not like I’m paying a premium for that customer service.  I would consider their prices reasonable and possibly even cheap if you consider the fact that you can get someone on the phone typically in under a minute… IF… YOU… CALL… DURING… BUSINESS… HOURS!

My host does not have 24/7 phone support.

I can live with that, but you may not be able to and it’s definitely something you should consider.  I’m positive that there is a distinct trade-off between finding a host that does provide 24/7 phone support and one that does not.  My host is InmotionHosting, and you can find them at our list of hosts.  I have worked with iPower as well.  They do have 24/7 phone support, but it’s been my experience that you’re hard-pressed to find a person that knows what they’re doing two hours out of the day low loan 24 and if you do happen to find that person that knows what they’re doing during that two hour window, odds are they’re very overworked, very pissed off and not likely to be terribly helpful to you.

Maybe if you could slide them a $50 bill over the phone, they might be nicer but I doubt it.

Over the past few weeks my hosting company, InMotion Hosting has gone through a couple different upgrades that resulted in a few minutes of down time on my virtual server. 

Oddly enough, the first time, I did not notice a disruption at all.  They had fore warned me about potential downtime (15 minutes possibly during a 4 hour window).  A few days later, I did notice a 10 minute disruption however.

Then this week they went through another 4 hour session and warned me of a 15 minute window of potential downtime again (maybe a cold boot or something).

This time the downtime happened right when one of my articles was under review by a customer and that triggered an error email showing up in my Mailboxes.  Email inboxes that is. 

All in all, I do enjoy working with InMotion.  They at least forewarned me of the upgrade and potential downtime which is more than I can say for other hosting companies I’ve worked with.

Someone recently asked me how to establish a MySQL connection for a CPanel account with Inmotion Hosting.

Here is the php code to establish the MySQL connection

Hope that helps, I found it difficult to find any documenation examples for this myself the first time around.

The key seems to be in utilizing a concatenation of your cpanel login id with your dB login id separated by an underscore.

Then repeat that concatenation example with your cpanel login id and your DB name.

Don’t use the concatenation with the passwords though.  You only need the db password for the call.

I’m still trying to figure out how to make the call remotely, but you can use this on php files that you upload into your hosted site via php.