I live in fear of something going wrong with my blog host provider and my entire blog just disappearing over night. I have recently heard a couple such horror stories that seriously make me shiver. I have put a lot of me into this blog and I have made a good many friends here have poured a lot of themselves into it, too. I don’t want to lose it.
Because of that I keep contemplating dedicated server hosting. With a server dedicated wholly to my blog and needs, I wouldn’t have to worry about data storage limits or how much band width my blog eats up. My blog is soon to celebrate it’s fourth birthday. I have 2129 published posts — 2130 counting this one — and at the time of this writing, 39,941 cherished comments.
I have also been looking into finding a more “hands-on” managed-hosting service. I like the fact that Superb.com promises 100% up-time and 24/7/365 service. That blows the service provider I have now way out of the running! Not only that, Superb would make the transfers for me. And with somebody else running the back-side of things I could spend a whole lot more time on the front-side.
Superb also offers managed colocation services. I am still a long way from needing to think about owning my own services, but if I ever do, colocation will definitely be my service choice. With colocation my servers are housed in a secure location especially designed to keep them running at optimum levels. I wouldn’t be the one constantly stressing over room temps, and adequate dust-free ventilation. Again, my servers would be monitored 24/7/365 and I wouldn’t be losing any sleep doing it myself.
I am always and forever looking for ways to de-stress (instead of distress) my life. Superb.com looks like they could do a superb job in keeping my blog running — and my files backed up — so I wouldn’t have to. Superb promises to keep their promises, takes pride in staying Ahead of the Rest®, and has earned more awards than any other hosting company — ever.
I used a dedicated server for mine. It’s the same one I run my facebook applications off it.
I used to have a different website that was on a much smaller server using a host, but one day my younger brother decided he wanted to try something. I asked him not to, but believe it or not, 15-year-old brothers don’t always like to listen to their older siblings.
So, when I was at work one day he logged into my website and wrote a php loop that would send out an eternal amount of emails to himself. He just wanted to see if he could do it. Of course he didn’t STOP the eternal loop script and within ten minutes his gmail inbox was filled with emails. Utterly, completely full.
So… gmail started sending out the “Delievery Notification Error: This inbox is too full to receive new messages” auto-response email in an eternal loop, one for each email it was trying to receive. These were sent, of course, back to my server host which is where the emails were coming from. My site crashed, as did every other site that my host hosted for other people because we used up all THEIR bandwidth.
Needless to say they deleted my website and banned me. I called them and tried to explain it to them, but of course the fact that it wasn’t even being sent to MY email address made them thing I was spamming people. To make it worse off, the email my brother had sent to himself so many times over was originally a spammy type message he had copy and pasted so it definitly looked like spam.
The only thing they could do for me was to refund the remaining portion of the year that I had all ready paid for, but I lost everything, all my posts and stuff.
(And if you’re wondering, I found a new host soon after but none as cheap as the first one, my brother paid the difference and spent hours re-building my website for me.)
After that we started making game applications (which got us banned from our new server because games use too much bandwidth) so we switched to the dedicated server and at that point, even though I had a copy of my old website, I just let the domain expire because I was too busy to put it back up again.
oops, I think my comment is as long as your blog post! LOL!!!
Teresa — it is! But it’s a great story! You should check these guys out for storing your server — your brother won’t be able to get near it!
I need him to have access as he does the coding for our fb apps, but I think he’s learned his lesson haha. I remember after he did it, he was in his room with a friend and I can in, all mad, saying to him
“my site got hacked and now I’m banned!!!!! They said someone is using it to spam people.” He didn’t say anything but when I went back to my room he came in and said “I don’t want to say anything with my friend there, but I think it’s my fault.” He looked so upset and guilty.
So I say, “No, no it’s not your fault, this was some spammy hacker person, they used it to send out hundeds of thousands of emails selling something.” and he’s like “that was me too.” And then explained what he’d done.
I clicked on the dedicated server link to see if it is the same one we use now, but it doesn’t go anywhere, just a 404 error on your own blog….
Teresa — I figured he’d learned his lesson. I just had to tease. And thank you. I have fixed the links!
Yep links work well now. It’s not the same one we have, but looks quite similar