Boy, I’m Tired

I am absolutely exhausted.

I have been working at home for most of the week. A few weeks ago, one of my servers went down. It was down for about 60 hours, which means three of my classifieds websites were down as well. I couldn’t wait for the lousy support (more about that later) to kick in to reboot the machine, so I initiated a new lease on a new server in my hosting company’s brand new data center. I spent a huge amount of time and effort switching multiple websites between the four servers I have now. After I was done, I took a nice breath and sat back. I thought I was done.

Well, a few days ago, one of the brand new servers went down. That one was quickly restarted to work just fine. The other brand new server has been giving me trouble ever since. Up…down…all with absolutely the worst support I have ever had to endure in my life. I can walk to the Philippines faster than I can get one of these people to actually fix my problem.

Well, it has come to my attention that one gets what one pays for, especially when it comes to website hosting companies. It was explained to me that the commodity item is the actual hardware and software of the operation, with the expense coming from the people. A hosting company can offer the most state of the art equipment for lease, but if it needs a restart or if there is a hardware issue, someone actually has to be there to fix it.

I learned this lesson the hard way.

One of my quirks is to diversify everything I do. I try not to have even two eggs in one basket. If one piece of income gets upset by something, the others are still making money. Unfortunately, everything is really expensive and takes years to figure out. I would say that I am halfway there.

As I write, I have anew server being set up with a new hosting company. I will still keep my current servers running, but will move some sites over to the new company. They are well known for their support. If you call at 2AM, someone will be there to answer the phone and fix the problem. I am most likely going to see if this is true, and if it is, it’s money well spent.