Hi all,

 

I've been a member here a long time and just want to say I appreciate all the help you guys give.

 

Anyway, I've finally found work for as the "web/IT guy" for a company that produces 3 magazines, and are expanding beyond that.

 

During the few weeks that I took over the reigns as the web guy, we've come to the point where our current host, HostPapa, have informed us that we need to upgrade as our current shared hosting account is negatively affecting other users on the server. This was fair enough, and I recommended to my superiors that we upgrade to a recommended VPS option (It's probably worth noting that we were also informed that it is against the TOS to have mass e-mail storage, which at the minute is where most of our storage/bandwidth comes from (we use just over 60gb of disk space OVERALL on our account).

 

So, while I was personally liasing with one of their colleagues about what sort of upgrade/email options there were, we received an email from HostPapa telling us that as of the 7th July our account would be suspended if we had not sorted out this excess usage of disk space. I notified the guy I was dealing with and he then assured me we wouldnt be suspended (even though the whole reason that we hadnt taken any action was because i was dealing with him regarding a possible upgrade). I notified him on the Friday prior that we were considering upgrading on that day but did not hear back from him all weekend. Nonetheless, at approx 4:25pm on Monday evening of July 7th our service was suspended.

 

This was absolutely detrimental to us as our sales team usually finish at 4:30pm and were not able to finalize any e-mails or correspond with clients. We have still potentially lost out on thousands of pounds because of this and we have a night-shift sales team who are starting on our new magazine, and if the system was to be down then they could not perform their jobs to any kind of success at all.

 

I called up HostPapa and was informed by the colleague I spoke to that the system administrator was happy to unsuspend the account, providing I placed an order for an upgrade to a VPS! You can imagine how infuriated I was by this completely ironic situation. However, the most important thing was to get the systems back online so I purchased a VPS option.

 

Just to rub salt in the wound the employee who I had been dealing with regarding the upgrade finally got back in touch with me the day afterwards, claiming to have had a family emergency (which I was suspicious about but at the end of the day cannot really do anything but take his word for it) so I was semi-happy to draw a line under the sand. But my boss wasn't.

 

On top of this, however, we have now been informed that the VPS-PRO option we went for is insufficient for migration and that we need the VPS-PREMIUM account (how we were not already informed of this is beyond my belief).

 

So at this point my boss is so unhappy about everything in general that he feels we could be better off elsewhere with a company that won't give us this kind of bulls***

 

I told him I'd put the feelers out and this was the first place I thought of coming to as Ive asked in the past for personal solutions and always had success.

 

anyone wanting to know about our company - www.sportip.biz acts as our portal.

 

Cheers in advance everyone.

obviously a huge part of changing our host would be the migration but I'm sure that'd be easy enough?

If time is of the essence then check out TSOhost as they offer free migration with VPS ... see https://www.tsohost.com/managed-servers/linux-vps

An excellent example where "unlimited" hosting does not exist, as HostPapa advertise

 

What's your monthly budget? If your sites needs a lot of resources it may be worth shopping around for a managed dedicated server rather than a VPS.

to be honest what we're personally looking for from a host is:

 

- CPanel

- addon domains

- Unlimited e-mail accounts, and mass e-mail storage allowed

- on-the-ball customer service

 

i guess since we're on 60gb disk space usage now maybe we'll need about 100gb

 

i doubt my boss would want to pay much more than the £89.99/mo we're going to end up having to pay on the hostpapa VPS-PREMIUM package.

Edited July 10, 201412 yr by kaneomak

Yes TSOhost as mentioned or Clook if you want top notch customer service. You may have to up your budget a bit if you want the best quality hosting service.

yeah ive spoken to both and they seem very sound and honest as far as customer service goes.

 

anyway, im thinking maybe some kind of hosted email solution would be appropriate but have no experience with this type of service and am finding it hard to judge what size we'd need. do know that we would probably require around 15-25 e-mail accounts, over the next few month at least.

Ive heard good reviews of digital ocean, but ive yet to use them myself

yeah ive spoken to both and they seem very sound and honest as far as customer service goes.

 

anyway, im thinking maybe some kind of hosted email solution would be appropriate but have no experience with this type of service and am finding it hard to judge what size we'd need. do know that we would probably require around 15-25 e-mail accounts, over the next few month at least.

 

I've got loads of clients who use a Microsoft Exchange email service, there are plenty of these providers around, in fact TSOhost who have been mentioned offer it - https://www.tsohost.com/email/microsoft-exchange - mind you long term email storage can get expensive so regular pruning of old emails is well worth it, or archiving them off somewhere if you really need to keep those attachments of cute cats

yeah that would probably cost us around £200/mo which i dont think is viable. im not sure how much the same would cost with google apps and then just have a shared hosting account or something for the website.

Even Gmail will charge you once your storage limits reach (currently) 15gb, even so, sacrificing your budget on email hosting rather than a decent web site host doesn't make financial/business sense. The web site should be your priority spend in my opinion and you'd need to take a look at long term email storage with whatever budget you have left, even if that restricts each email account to a maximum amount of storage space.