I recently had to switch web hosts, something I really, really hate doing. It’s usually a hassle and things usually go wrong and, most importantly, I hate feeling like I made a dumb choice of hosts to begin with.

I was in this same position last year. I’d been with one host (American Web Hosting) for several years. I’d been happy with them for a lot of those years. But in that last 12 months I was with them there was a slew of problems. My site would go down randomly, my email wouldn’t work, the server I was on got blacklisted so my email wouldn’t even get to the folks I tried to contact. It was a mess. Plus, I was tired of having little space, limited sub-domains, and no ability for add-on domains at a non-crazy price.

When I went looking for a new host I did some research. I looked at rating sites and asked friends for advice. Many people suggested Dreamhost, but I kept seeing so many others having issues with them. One host kept popping up with high ratings: Lunarpages. Lots of space (unlimited!) lots of bandwidth (more unlimited!), as many sub-domains as I wanted and add-on domains included. For a not bad price, either. I signed up, paid a full year in advance, and was generally happy.

Then about 3 months ago something weird happened — I got an email from Lunarpages saying they’d disabled one of my scripts (actually the index.php file on a WordPress blog I had), claiming that it was taking up too much CPU on the server. Like 85%. The day before I’d installed a new plugin and I figured that must have triggered something odd.  I disabled the plugin and asked to have my index page restored — it took them 2 days to do so.

A couple of weeks later I recommended Lunarpages to someone. They Googled and found this page right away: Lunarpages sucks.

Oh crap.

I was alarmed because the situation described on that page matched what I’d gone through, just my scale was smaller. I started to worry because If LP was just making up this stuff about my index page actually causing some problem in order to upsell me and continue to do so until I bought a way expensive package, I was not down with that. But as I was still half convinced that the plugin had been the real culprit I decided to stay on with LP.

Big. Mistake. (more…)