I’m having a pretty frustrating time at the moment, with a service I used to be happy enough with in the past. Most of my websites are hosted with a hosting provider called ServerGrid. We’ve had a pretty good relationship over the last few years, no outages that stuck in my mind, no major complaints, I was pretty happy to recommend them to anyone who asked me for a hosting recommendation on a Windows service.

All this changed a few months ago. Service has been intermittent. I wake up most days to find my sites not responding, giving lots of PHP timeouts or just generally slow. (I know most of my sites are heavy, but a 110 second load time, just isn’t acceptable to me). Today, same problem, AskOwen.info was giving timeout errors when I woke up, so I raised a high priority ticket. Three hours later, the site is still down, and there has been no response to my ticket. The provider prides itself on their 24/7 service, but I don’t seem to be getting any of it.

Two days ago, I sent a complaint letter when I reported a fault and CCed their sales department. Haven’t heard anything back.

Now, as a consumer, the only signals I’m getting from this company is that either they’re not interested in my business, or that they don’t have the resources to cope with my issues. Both these are not the signs of a happy and fruitful relationship. The only reason I’m still hosted there is that I pay a yearly fee for my hosting, and well, I still have a few months left. However, I have already started looking for alternatives. This website for example, is hosted on Tubu.net. It’s a much smaller outfit, but when I asked for this site to be set up, it took them all of 3 minutes to open an account for me and give me access to it. This site is much faster than all my other blogs, so I think I’ll start moving other WordPress installations over and see how I get on.

Now, I don’t know if ServerGrid are making the mistake of ignoring my complaints, emails, chats etc. However, my perception is that they are, and at the end of the day, that’s all that matters. Business is all about relationships and if a supplier jilts me, well, I’m perfectly happy to find a different supplier to take my business to.