Aug
28

Site5 Hosting

Written by kpoirier

 Almost all of the websites I host are currently located on the www.site5.com servers and all are created using the Drupal (www.drupal.org) content management system. I just checked the control panel and to my surprise, I found that I've been with them since October, 2006 - almost 4 years at the time of this post. Wow. 

I recently had a scare where I lost 5-6 of my websites due to a problem with the Innodb tables within those particular websites databases - and site5, although they eventually restored the databases, were not able to restore those tables. Luckily, those tables contained older data from an uninstalled, but not fully cleaned up module so no real harm was done. 

The scare was that they (site5) initially said they couldn't restore my databases and yes, I know I should have made my own backups but let's ignore that for now... I was a bit freaked out at first but they (within the 36 hours) got all my websites working without issue. So I decided to take a look at how long I've been hosting with them and how many issues I've had over that time to asses whether I should move to another provider or not.

So, over the last 4 years there have only been about a half dozen problems I have logged and the majority of those have been problems with the connection to the MySQL database with regards to the update function Drupal uses to go to updates.drupal.org and to see if there are security and other module updates. The timeout variable used on the site5 servers is set too low. 

So, in reality, I haven't had many problems in the last 4 years and the techs I've worked with have been helpful and polite.

 

I'm currently using one of the lower end shared hosting plans with Multisite capabilities and the performance is what you would expect from a cheaper plan so I have no complaints there and I may try one of the Virtual Private Server plans at some time but will compare costs with other providers first.