For all the promise of the Free Market, it’s a little unfortunate that incompetence and poor customer service seem to be the rule more often than they are the exception. Where’s the market forces? I guess it’s hard to vote with your feet when hot coals constitute every single option.

Web hosting is an interesting one, because of course it is so new that there are no large, established names that can rely solely on their brand. On the other hand, demand has absolutely exploded so new customers are everywhere. It’s also a pretty unhindered market – location doesn’t matter, there’s not really any lock-in (just re-point your domain), and as said above, no companies are large enough to mess things up. Frankly, I’m pretty happy with what I get – a domain for $US10 per year and pretty good hosting for $US44 per year is a drop in the bucket compared to all the hours I spend on it. I would like to know why going with a New Zealand host costs so much more – surely our costs aren’t higher than those in the US? Surely there’s enough New Zealanders to get some economies of scale? And how come .nz domains cost so much more?

For the most part, when I see people talk about their hosting companies on their blogs, it’s overwhelmingly positive. (Compare this to comments on, say, cellphone carriers, or broadband.) But you also get the other side. Recently Dreamhost had some rather significant downtime – not unusual for them, I hear. In what seems like misguided PR at its finest, their apology was “ha ha, did you see that, LOL!”

I am with Total Choice Hosting. This is because they hosted our previous site, nocents.org (RIP), since the first bunch wiped out our forums without warning or backup due to some obscure T&Cs violation. Frankly, TCH are pretty damn good – it’s a cheap service and you get good performance, good uptime, and great service – people actually reply (!) to your support requests. There was one incident recently that soured our relationship – our site went down, I combed their site, forums, status pages and found nothing about it so filed a support request. Oh yes, they said, there was a hardware failure and we are restoring from the backup now! Check the forums for updates! Well, that’s cool I guess, but I don’t think I see anything in your forums. I checked back later, and again, couldn’t find anything anywhere referring to it. So, had we not noticed, we might never have known it was down. Which is unfortunate, because their backup was a day old and my most recent blog post had disappeared. (Yes, even at my posting rate. How unlikely was that?) Fortunately, I still had a copy of it in my text editor. This was purely by chance, and if I hadn’t, it would have just been outright lost. Not so cool, but… all in all, considering what we pay, this isn’t too unreasonable. My only real issue was with their poor communication. Where I mean, poor from my point of view, but also dumb from their point of view – it is much cheaper to post in your forum than answer lots of individual support requests. This is the incompetence bit, where everyone loses, as opposed to being screwed over, where only the consumer loses. Not sure which one is worse, but at least if someone screws you over and is up-front about it, you can respect that. It’s hard to respect stupidity.

Here’s what sucks, though. PHP5 came out in 2004. It’s now 2007, and PHP5 is fast becoming the standard. I have been quite patient about this. But, you know, there’s patience and there’s eternity. Apparently TCH have opted for the latter:

With PHP 5 having been out for so long now, and many of todays applications beginning to require it, I am surprised that TCH has no plan to migrate. How about making some new servers available with PHP5 so that new or existing customers can choose or migrate to them? [etc]

[Jan 14 2007] Currently there are no plans to migrate to PHP5.

I mean, it’s bad enough that they haven’t done it yet. But they don’t even have plans to do it? I really like being a customer of TCH. I just don’t understand. Why would you force your customers to leave?