I'm currently hosting with Arvixe, but am in the process of switching to webjogger. Why? Arvixe does maintenance without telling me, and when they do that, they shut down my Always Up, which shuts down my web site. It's just happened again. I got a call this morning from one of my builders saying the website had been down since sometime yesterday afternoon. I thanked him profusely for letting me know, hung up, then said many many many bad words.... and logged into the RDP to get things up and running again. Always Up will not protect you if somebody shuts it down!
They also, as do many hosting services, use a special Control Panel thing, that uses IIS. So, when I call for technical support I have to argue with them about whether "free technical support" means they can say "but only if we can use our Web Panel".
So - my advice to anybody starting up with Alpha Five is to use a hosting service that's familiar with Alpha Five. I started my webjogger account about a month ago (I'm using it to stage my website upgrade, will make the switch within the week). They not only installed and set up my WAS (I sent them my license number), but for a modest tech support fee they set up the 4 instances I needed, each with their own neatly packaged FTP login, where I only see what I need to see. I publish manually, and that sure does make it easier. Getting things set up with Arvixe was a bit of a nightmare. Every time we turned around that flippin' IIS was started and hogging port 80 again - and their tech support is only trained to use that web panel. I had selected them based on stellar reviews by web professionals, and their service is otherwise just lovely (when I made a really big mess at one point, they restored me from a backup without a hitch) - just not, imho, appropriate for any application not using IIS only. I kinda feel bad about naming them here, but we had a LONG talk about this the last time it happened, I was told to put a big not on the desktop, etc. I did. And - he said he'd put a note on the account. Anybody even taking half a second to look before doing anything would have known to either restart Always Up or to contact me before performing any actions. If there's a way to have Always Up always restart itself automatically, that might be good for folks to know. I'm not a professional programmer or even much of a computer whiz... And, once I told them how important it is, one would think that nice man at Arvixe would have said, "well, we can set it up that even with an automatic restart...". They didn't, it failed again, so I'm outta there.
I know that Zebra Host also installs and configures the WAS, also makes sure Port 80 is available, and also doesn't do stupid things that take down A5 web sites. I'm sure there are other Alpha aware hosting services as well. And I've found that these don't cost any more, and often have Alpha Five specials. Maybe folks could post any others they are using and would recommend.
So - I'm just throwing that two cents out there to help the next newbie.
They also, as do many hosting services, use a special Control Panel thing, that uses IIS. So, when I call for technical support I have to argue with them about whether "free technical support" means they can say "but only if we can use our Web Panel".
So - my advice to anybody starting up with Alpha Five is to use a hosting service that's familiar with Alpha Five. I started my webjogger account about a month ago (I'm using it to stage my website upgrade, will make the switch within the week). They not only installed and set up my WAS (I sent them my license number), but for a modest tech support fee they set up the 4 instances I needed, each with their own neatly packaged FTP login, where I only see what I need to see. I publish manually, and that sure does make it easier. Getting things set up with Arvixe was a bit of a nightmare. Every time we turned around that flippin' IIS was started and hogging port 80 again - and their tech support is only trained to use that web panel. I had selected them based on stellar reviews by web professionals, and their service is otherwise just lovely (when I made a really big mess at one point, they restored me from a backup without a hitch) - just not, imho, appropriate for any application not using IIS only. I kinda feel bad about naming them here, but we had a LONG talk about this the last time it happened, I was told to put a big not on the desktop, etc. I did. And - he said he'd put a note on the account. Anybody even taking half a second to look before doing anything would have known to either restart Always Up or to contact me before performing any actions. If there's a way to have Always Up always restart itself automatically, that might be good for folks to know. I'm not a professional programmer or even much of a computer whiz... And, once I told them how important it is, one would think that nice man at Arvixe would have said, "well, we can set it up that even with an automatic restart...". They didn't, it failed again, so I'm outta there.
I know that Zebra Host also installs and configures the WAS, also makes sure Port 80 is available, and also doesn't do stupid things that take down A5 web sites. I'm sure there are other Alpha aware hosting services as well. And I've found that these don't cost any more, and often have Alpha Five specials. Maybe folks could post any others they are using and would recommend.
So - I'm just throwing that two cents out there to help the next newbie.
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