It hasn’t been any secret that we’ve been experiencing ongoing difficulties with our current web host Surpass Hosting. My original decision to use them was because of how inexpensive they were and that most elements of their service were unlimited. Unfortunately unlimited is relative, especially in terms of hard drive space.

Despite firefall.io being relatively small, about 900MB including e-mail, the server is always full. Not only is it full but recently it’s always under a heavy load. This really makes development interesting. Running out of room causes all sorts of strange stuff to happen. It’s also difficult to pinpoint if a script is running slow on it’s own, or if the server is bogged down. On a few occasions the load has been so bad that one of our data migration scripts couldn’t complete.

Our support requests have only resulted in temporary relief and the realization of the support staff’s inability to both read and write English. The problems usually go away for a few weeks, maybe a month or two and then things start acting strange again.

After pleading with them to make some lasting changes, and watching my tickets go on hold indefinitely, I decided it was time to look around for a new host before things became critical. I started by looking at some of the hosts that provide mirroring for Sourceforge, but they were all way to expensive or had extremely handicapped packages. Aniel doesn’t like his host much, removing one more option. Randomly I decided to check out who was hosting the Adium website, which lead me to Network Redux.

I can’t even begin to say how cool these guys are. They offer free data transfer from any other cPanel based host, making switching services seamless. Their prices are very competitive, even to Surpass, and while they don’t have unlimited everything, they provide ample room, and some tough servers. Instead the broke-ass 1 processor machine at Surpass, we’re now on a quad, that has a load average of a hibernating bear. They also have a bunch of software packages running, that you don’t often find, like Sub Version.

We haven’t moved over to them yet completely, just incase there are some transitionary bugs, but I’ll keep everyone updated on how it turns out.