This is my first post to this board which I had visisted before when I was looking for a new host.

I had stayed on a cheap shared account at hostgator.com but due to my sites growing bigger, reaching their 250.000 Inode limit and wanting more power I decided to go for a VPS.

I ended up with several companies to choose from after having read through these boards and went for WiredTree.com besides having read some not that positive recent remarks about their service. I did so because they had offered a very high inode limit with 3 Millions.

Well, as it has turned out now that’s been a big mistake and I am very sorry for it …

I signed up for a 6 months term and prepaid it in full.

WiredTree.com migrated my site fast and I thought without problems so I was happy.

Shortly after the site was unreachable. A hardware problem with a node. No problem! This sure can happen.

Hardly one month later I went on vacation. A nice cruise which I had safed up for a long time and rendering me without internet.

When I called my family they said that all of my sites had went down only shortly after I had departed.

Hence I would rush into the next internet cafe trying to figure out what had happened. I noticed several automatic eMails in my eMail account informing my site drive space was critical at 88%. I have 60 GB drive space and my sites are about 6 – 7 GB in size …

None of my PHP applications wasn’t working anymore. However there were no error messages.

I was very worried and oppened a support ticket … this was the start of a long and worriesome journey involing me hurrying from one internet cafe to anotehr whenver I got off the ship.

As it turned out after over one week of communicating back forth there was a mismatching php.ini file in my root directory. It had either been migrated from my old host or it has deen placed there when they did install Perl on the system.

This local php.ini file did not contain the proper path to some important php libraries. Hence PHP applications would generate error_logs which finally grew to a huge size causing PHP to crash again generating thousands of core files, taking up almost all of the webspace.

The fix? Deleting the error logs, core files and php.ini file.

I found support to be very poor. When I reported to them that I was having a problem with my hard drive suddenly having grown from about 20% to 88% useage I receive for example a reply saying like that’s no big deal, I still have 12% to go …

Come on! That’s teh time you really scratch your head wondering if they do really read your eMails at all.

I had to ask three (!) time for a support team member to look into one of the core files and letting me know me know what was the cause for the creation of those. Again I was on board of a ship with no web access at 99% of the time and then not having the abbilitie to look into these files myself as the huge amount of core files would shut down my Webhostmanger.

Whenever I got off the ship I had to run for an internet cafe and I would still see my PHP applications being down all the time. This is critical as I run several online forums.

Not to mention this really made my day(s) and spoiled my vacation …

I finally sent them an eMail that I would cancel my account if they do not fix the issue by the end of my vacation. Guess what, on the next day it was working … surpise, surprise!

They had just deleted the huge error log file and core files.

However the real error still had not been fixed and I had do this myself, deleting the wrong php.ini file after I had been back home.

I was very disappointed and wrote an eMail to them. I wouldn’t get an appology from them at first saying “Hey, you didn’t reply to us in time but it took you very long to get back to our support team” … guys: I was on a cruise! I guess that’s when you need support …

I am writing this message because now my site is again down. And my confidence has grown to 0. Another problem with the hardware node my VPS is on.

In short: Can I recommend WireTree.com so far? No!

I feel that a large overseller like HostGator.com is offering better support and a more stable enviornment. I had never expirienced such a big problem when I was on HostGator (for several years) nor did I have that much down time. Overall I am very disappointed and regret having moved to WiredTree.com so far.

I have about 5 more months to go with them. Let’s see if things get better. I hope they do!

Best wishes to all of you,

Nicole