Yesterday On BirchHosting

Yesterday from about 6pm until 3:40am GMT my site was in various states of unreachable. This was due to a fault on the server my webhost owns. I don't know any details other than a reboot around 6pm didn't work. It turned out to be a hardware failure, and everyone's databases etc had to be restored from backups, hence the downtime. This does give me an ideal opportunity to blog about my webhost.

Let me start by staying that I use a company called BirchHosting. I have a Linux package, so my site is proudly hosted on RHEL servers and I recommend them to anyone looking for a webhost. The only connection I have to them is being a satisfied customer.

This is the first downtime I've had since setting my digital homestead on their server, and hardware faults can happen to anyone. I have had previous questions regarding how the control panel works and even before deciding to join I had a couple of questions. They offer a one month free hosting trial before you decide, I wanted to be assured my free month was going to be on the RHEL server not a Windows one since they offer a choice of the two. The way those were dealt with, and have been ever since has made me recommend them to anyone.

BirchHosting are very responsive to questions, they take the time to actually respond, rather than just shunt you off to a vague FAQ page, although I'd imagine that's down to the time they have and what your question is. They welcome suggestions on how they can improve. In short, they actually want your custom. They deserve it too. I am not surprised in the least that they win awards.

With anything in life, it's unrealistic to expect to have no issues, the mark of a good or bad company is how they deal with it. If they try to hide it, delay fixing it, give vague answers and generally don't care, you don't really want to use that company. BirchHosting always inform you in advance of planned upgrades etc, and they do throw everything into fixing unexpected issues quickly to minimise the downtime as much as possible.

They do offer a referral bonus scheme for existing customers to benefit from sending new customers their way, I've chosen to do it that way, so I do gain a little by sending you there. Not only do you get something a lot of companies seem to have forgotten how to do; good customer service, but you get great value for money.

Yesterday I did two blog posts which came after the backup they had to restore from, so both were lost. Except that's not entirely true; they were lost from the backup. Luckily I wrote them as plain text documents in PyRoom, and still have those, so later today I will be able to copy and paste those back in, add the markup etc and repost them (pretty close to) as they were yesterday. One of the posts is actually about PyRoom, so stay tuned.

*Update*

I've decided to activate the BirchHosting affiliate program, and changed the link and disclaimer accordingly. Given that I'm barely able to afford food at this time, pride needs to take a back seat. I don't expect to make much from it, but a few bucks here and there can't hurt. I refuse to endorse anything I don't use or believe in.