The Web Hosting Crisis is Over

Last Friday, I received a rather disturbing email. It seems that our web hosting company decided to leave the dedicated server market and failed to notify us. To make matters more interesting, it seems that they failed to notify many and we all caught wind of this when a competitor of there's, CeraNet, contacted us offering us a deal if we switched now.

To be honest, I am completely shocked at how our previous hosting company, BlueMile, acted. They claim they sent us an email a month earlier stating that we needed to move and that we could have always found said email in our inbox within our admin area.

I have two problems with this. First, who shuts down a hosting business and only sends a single email to its clients letting them know? Yes, one email. Further, who ever checks their hosting's admin area for messages? What kind of logic is that?

To make things even worse, when the company realized their mistake their only response was, "That's your problem." They could have easily left the servers running another week or two so people could breathe a bit, but they don't care about their clients any further than accepting their money.

Well, we decided to go with CeraNet, primarily over price. They made a decent offer and their rates are pretty low. They had also promised to help, but unfortunately what we needed was beyond their capabilities. The scariest part of CeraNet is the knowledge that they hired some of Bluemile's staff. Considering how terrible Bluemile treated us and many of their other customers, I am left to wonder if we are fated to suffer a repeated crisis. I am not confident that we will be staying with CeraNet very long.

The move to CeraNet proved incredibly difficult. In the beginning of 2012, we rebuilt the entire front end. We did not, however, change the back end. The back end was terribly written and wouldn't work on the latest version of PHP. When confronted with the choice of whether to install an old version of PHP or fix the site, I opted to fix the site. This was far more difficult than I had thought, and was only accomplished after hiring some help. None the less, the back end has now gone through a badly needed cleaning and is now fully functional.

After a ton of work and a great deal of testing, we have now finalized the move. In so doing, I have also managed to streamline the migration process so now I can move Mizozo in a matter of hours virtually anywhere. I am hoping that I will never be under the gun like this again, but at least now I'm ready.

This has been one of the toughest weeks in Mizozo's history. When contemplating the fact that Mizozo may go down for days because of some asshole hosting company, I was highly enraged while incredibly motivated. The fact that things came up with barely 24 hours to spare leaves me in a shudder. But, thankfully it is all over and we are back to Business As Usual!


tl;dr - Bluemile screwed us over. They're a horrible company who can't be trusted. CeraNet may not be much better because they hired Bluemile's staff. Mizozo has now moved to CeraNet regardless, but we now have a slightly better site and are in a position where we can move in a matter of hours.