Dave Naffziger's Blog

1and1, my cheap hosting company, lost a database server Tuesday around 2am (from what I can tell from the Urchin logs). This shared database server hosted my blog content (and I’m sure plenty of others as well). Support was horrendous (30 min phone queue times), and incredibly unhelpful. Answers to basic questions like: when was the last backup made? when do you expect this to be fixed? went unanswered.

And, the timing was awful. My post on banned sites at Digg made the Digg front page the day before. The site handled the 9,000 visits I received the hour the blog was dugg fine (wp-cache is my hero), and traffic had really tapered several hours before the server went down. Regardless, the blog was still seeing substantial post-Digg traffic as people were finding the site from various secondary sources. Matt has an amusing post on suing for lost reputational value.

So, I’m looking for a new shared hosting company. Not because they lost a server, but because it took them 24 hrs to recover and they had awful support during the process. Any suggestions (I’m guessing I should avoid those that are banned by Digg like Lunarpages)?