Hello Tsohost and bog off Streamline
By Phil ~ February 9th, 2009. Filed under: Work.
Following less than perfect service from Streamline – in fact it was even less than crap! – I was forced into moving Harriers Online from them to a new host over the weekend.
My contract with them ends on February 28th but when I called Streamline to tell them I wanted to give notice of leaving they said that I couldn’t cancel more than seven days before and if I left it until six days before they would renew automatically. So they were basically saying that I couldn’t cancel the account until the 21st and if I forget to do it until the next day then I would be charged for another year!
They’re further off their rockers than I thought possible.
So I’d now got a deadline to meet or miss it and pay the penalty. I had to now a look round for a new host quickly. I searched for info on two Hosting message boards: Web Hosting Talk and Web Host Chat and came up with a handful and discarded all but two: Zen Internet and Tsohost.
I went with the latter mainly because of the more generous bandwidth allowance.
Once I got that sorted it was a matter of backing up the website and dumping the two databases onto the desktop. I shut the message board down at 5:00pm on Friday last and then disaster struck. Our phones went dead and the internet went off.
I’d arranged with my new host for them to import the db’s at just gone five so now I quickly had to call them up to cancel. I’d also called First Telecom (my excellent phone service suppliers) about the problem and they said it was a line fault and that BT would fix it on the following Tuesday.
I was stumped. What do I do now? The Harriers had got two games coming up against Cambridge Utd and York City on Monday and Wednesday and I would need to get the respective pages sorted on Sunday. Suddenly at 7:30pm the internet came back on but not the phones!!!
Up early Saturday morning then to get cracking on the move and thanks to the brilliant Darren at Tsohost it was all done by lunchtime. All I needed to do now was wait for the name servers to kick in (I’d done this first thing in the morning).
I waited and waited and then made some changes to the site in the evening thinking that they would have changed by then. I think I was expecting a seamless move. Never happens that way though.
We went out for a meal in honour of her birthday the previous weekend (she wasn’t well enough then so it got postponed) and when we got back I went onto my site to see a disaster.
The name server had finally kicked in and in place of the usual forum was a basic, virgin phpBB board. Also missing was the other db, the Prediction League.
A bit of midnight oil got burned as I battled to sort the forum out and finally got it all done around mid night but the newest problem was that I could log in but I couldn’t activate the board again because the Configuration page in the ACP had somehow got corrupted. Quickly over to the phpBB Support Forums but they’d been hacked yet again so I went onto the phpBB Hacks site and asked for help on there.
The problem was solved by Sunday morning – it was just a simple matter of over writing the RedSilver admin files with the original SubSilver version.
The next problem was the Prediction League. That was a bit harder because the install.php files wouldn’t let me log in but that problem too was sorted on the software’s own message board. This time a simple matter of deleting two lines in a file that doesn’t like MySQL5.
So now I have a website that doesn’t kick up continual server errors and runs much, much faster into the bargain. I have also found myself a site host that seem to know what they are doing and I have such a real confidence in them that I think this could become a long term arrangement.
If you’re on the lookout for a new host then give Tsohost a try. You won’t regret it.
