A friend recommended me to Easyspace (a web hosting company based in Glasgow, Scotland – part of the iomart group). Their prices looked good, they were UK based, and I could handle almost everything online…

My VPS has been running silky smooth ever since. It’s never been blindingly fast in terms of network speed… but I don’t need a huge pipe onto the net yet.

Problems started as work slowed towards the end of the 2009 and funds dried up. I didn’t even notice, but the December invoice didn’t get paid. I had no notice or warning. Because of the holidays, I left my accounting until the new year.

While I was off, I received an email (twice, on 29th December) stating that someone from Easyspace had tried to call me (I received no such call), but they needed me to call back to sort out a problem with payment. This email stated that my services “have lapsed”.

I checked that my server was still operational: it was. I checked my Easyspace Control Panel for recent, failed transactions requiring my attention: none. My assumption: their mistake.

As I came to do my accounts for December (a little later than normal), I noticed that no payment was taken at the beginning of December for Easyspace. Was I wrong to assume that this could have been an internal error? If you were a hosting company and a customer had failed to pay for your services, when would you contact them to sort it out?

While I was in my Easyspace Control Panel, I noticed that there was an invoice outstanding: dated 02/02/10… ”This must be the one they’re talking about,” I thought. I paid this invoice there and then online (even assigning it a special code of their choosing so they could flag it up on their accounts more easily).

I had acknowledgement of this payment and my service seemingly continued. My server showed up in my account; all was well.

Skip to today. For various reasons I don’t know from when my server went down, but it has now been down all day.

After two very calm and collected phone calls to Easyspace to sort this problem out, even paying the payments they had failed to take (December + January), and waiting very patiently (for now 11 hours from initial contact!) I am royally cheesed off.

So to recap: they didn’t warn me that my payments weren’t processed, the “warning” they did give was late and uninformative (it was an automated email after all), and even though I had attempted to comply to their wishes they still took my server offline (again without warning) and have so far yet to restore it, although all accounts are settled.

And to top it all, their automated telephone queuing service is rubbish. It simply rings and puts you straight into the queue; no “Thank you for calling Easyspace” to let you know you’ve called the correct number, just music until you hear the standard rotation message of “thank you for waiting”.

Therefore, I am now looking to move my web hosting needs to another provider. So if you have any suggestions, I would be welcome to hear them! Stick your referral links in the comments.

While this may be painful for me, this experience has taught me a few lessons:

1. If in doubt, speak to a person – despite how difficult they make it
2. Always have a backup server ready to take over
3. Don’t trust other organisations to do things the ideal way (no matter how easy it should be for them to implement)

Yet, despite all of this I am thankful for a couple of things:

1. At least this server wasn’t running anything too mission critical
2. Other important services (esp. email) are hosted elsewhere, e.g. Google
3. I don’t have to stay with Easyspace
4. I can go to bed without worrying or stressing because I’m so laid-back it’s not ruffling my feathers all that much, in the grand scheme of things

Rant over, Simon out.

In our office, we have a small custom, headless 32-bit PC running Ubuntu Server 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). It’s ideally suited as our testing platform web server, file server, SVN server… well you get the picture.

The web developer and design community is growing super large and because of that it has been an endless source of advice and inspiration to me. As a large thank you gesture I want to offer my professional advice and support in any areas I can.