I visited the forums today to look for a particular smilie, but while scanning the list I noticed the Web Hosting forum and felt I had to post my experience with Tera-Byte.
I haven't visited this forum in a while, not since I asked for recommendations for webhosts in December of 2000. One of the recommendations was for Tera-Byte. They seemed very reasonable with 100MB/10GB for about $100/year, so I went with them.
And boy was I happy. I had no previous webhosting experience, but between their help pages and a little phone help I was able to set up my website. Things went very well for a long time.
Then suddenly this past March the database files for threads and forums starting getting corrupted or reduced to 0 bytes. I spent lots of time rebuilding thread databases, restoring from backup and apologizing to members, and lots more time perusing and testing the code trying to figure out what was going wrong. Got nowhere.
Then it suddenly hit me. The CGI processes were dying in mid stream! I called Tera-Byte and my suspicions were confirmed. Without telling a soul, they had imposed CPU and virtual memory limits on all shared hosting accounts.
I was very upset. It's not that I don't think they have the right to do this. In fact, it's a necessity. What upset me was that they didn't tell anyone.
And they were antagonistic when I mentioned how unhappy I was. Gone was all the kind helpfulness via email and phone. I was using the dreaded UBB software from InfoPop, and if my processes were being killed it was my own fault, I should rewrite the code to be more efficient, and I should switch to MySQL. Yeah, right, in my spare time. I asked for my money back for the current 6-month period (I had just renewed a few weeks before), and when they declined I filed a complaint with the Edmonton BBB.
So I switched from Tera-Byte to ValueWeb. For about $240/year you get 200MB/10GB. I'm not happy about the higher cost, but I had to switch fast and didn't have time for a lengthy investigation.
I should mention I'm still at version 5.7c. I *did* make one significant software change to improve performance to CreateThreadHTMLWork in ubb_library2.pl that makes it far more efficient with respect to virtual memory if anyone's interested.
I haven't been keeping up with version 6 because it would be so hard for me to switch what with all the special features I've added (if anyone's curious it's at
http://www.evcforum.net, the significant added features are numbering of messages, tracking of who's replied to which message, lists of messages by member, breakdowns of threads by message, message preview), but I expect I'll be looking into it one of these days.
Thanks for listening!
--Percy
EvC Forum Administrator
