One of HostSo server to which this blog website account of mine resides on underwent some sort of restoration work and as a result it was down for over a day and a half. I noticed the problem only when I wanted to update my blog the day before yesterday and connection timeout persists. I wrote to the their helpdesk and I got the following response:

We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you. The server on which your account is stored is under restoration. It will take 2 to 4 hours to complete the process. Once the process is completed then your site will be online.Meanwhile your patience and co-operation is highly appreciated.

We do apologizes for all the inconvenience caused to you, The server is going for resoration ( Re-imaging ) due to primary drive failure after 2 hours. This issue may take 7 to 8 hours. Once the restoration will get finish all the services from the server will get restore fine and you should able to access the site without any problem. We are re-imaging all the data from older drive to the new drive as it is, and due to bad shape of the primary drive its taking long to copy the data over new Disk. We request you to bear with us in this situation we can understand your frustration and your business but your patience is highly appreciated.

HostSo is the first web-hosting service provider that I signed up for as far as self hosting account is concern  and it is unimaginable that I actually just go ahead without doing much research about the company. My main concern during that time was then of affordability. The Elite package seems like a pretty good deal so I just go with it.

Downtime occurrences are high and sometime your sites just get blocked by the HostSo firewall for no apparent reason. When you write to them the support staff will respond with all sorts of excuses. Even though the Elite plan comes with “Unlimited Bandwidth” the funny thing is that they disabled my account a few times under pretext that my sites are consuming too much traffic bandwidth!

I checked the forum for complaints against this company and there are plenty of them.  Quite a high number of unhappy and frustrated customers accounts  were terminated for no obvious reasons. No warnings given whatsoever, so it seems to me that this company reputation is quite awful.

Web page loading time is very slow and to make matter worse, some adults sites are also hosted on this server. Some SEO analysis sites even reported that this blog has adult themes  for which I believed were due to sharing of the same shared server.

In summary, do your homework before you purchase hosting from any web hosting service provider. Cheaper doesn’t necessary translate to better service quality. Don’t believe the numbers and information  that you see on the company website. Take some time to research the company, check for complains, reviews and gather as much information as you can.

Choosing right best web hosting service provider for your online business is not trivial. You need to consider various aspects such as the amount of traffic that your site expect to generate, the type of software and the amount of processing power that the scripts will need, service of quality, downtime frequency and etc.

It’s  better to be safe then to be sorry later. Do check out my previous article on essential requirements for web-hosting service provider. There’s another good article that I’ve come across  on how to choose the right web-hosting service provider.  All your hard work and efforts to build a successful online business may go to naught if you are not careful with whom you signed up with.

Anyway I am glad my blog is now back online.   There are things that I will do, notably to back up all my files just in case something crops up again. One could never predict when HostSo.com server  is going to run into problem again or when they are going to terminate customer account.