A Small Orange – VPS Downtime

As you may have noticed, Grunch has been down for a nearly a week. The reason is, well i don’t know the damn reason.

A Small Orange which was previously my favorite host, has been broken for nearly a week, since the 25th, with no real explanation. I’ve been leaving the site hosted with them, hoping it’d come back on, but day after day, i’m finally getting annoyed.

I finally decided to put Grunch temporarily on my old shared hosting account which is hosted with GeekStorage. I assumed it’d be much slower since its basic shared hosting, but surprisingly its getting high ratings on Google PageSpeed and GTMetrix.

Geek Storage GT Metrix Rating
Geek Storage GT Metrix Rating
Geek Storage Google PageSpeed Rating
Geek Storage Google PageSpeed Rating

I really don’t know whats going on with ASO, or our future with them. I have prepaid for a full year of hosting, but nearly a week of downtime without a real explanation is not acceptable, and I’m not too sure if i wan’t to continue with them.

Their support has pretty much annoyed me earlier in the month. The cloud backup system suddenly stopped working, and their support pretty much told me that itys an unsupported feature, even though their site clearly states that there are automated weekly backups. If they don’t mean this automatic system, then perhaps they have another one in the background that they handle themselves, i don’t know.

I think the backup failing issue was an indicator that something major was going on behind the scenes with the server connections and settings, which led to the downtime we are having now.

luckily, since i had the backup issue with them, i manually create backups that day via SSH and downloaded them via FTP, so I had pretty much an accurate up todate backup beofre the completely failure, that i was able to upload to GeekStorage.

Read my interaction with their useless support.
Read my interaction with their useless support.

Support at ASO has always been horrible now, it could be due to them being an EIG company. I wonder if this is the end of them being a great host too. People have been waiting for the end to come ever since EIG acquired them in 2012, but ASO continued to be super great and speedy. Maybe this is it.

The support hasn’t said much, or gave any real reason as to why the downtime. I give them benefit of the doubt that something major is going on. but then again, they should of had it resolved by now, i mean a week if downtime? get serious.

asofacebook
ASO Facebook comments

Their facebook is also being flooded with angry customers, without a single reply from ASO. Maybe all their tech people are on XMAS vacation, or something. I don’t know.

Downtime Status. doesn't really say much
Downtime Status. doesn’t really say much

They do randomly update a status page, which they cut in half because it was getting longer and longer, but they pretty much just write the same update status, without any real info at all.

The plan now is to just sit on GeekStorage until ASO gets their shit back up. I know the site has gotten high ratings on GeekStorage using the page speed tools, but I ran the tests at like 5am when most of the server visitors were probably asleep, and its simply basic shared hosting so the speed isn’t going to be consistent, and wont stay fast.

I do still like ASO, and am willing to give them another chance. This is the first major trouble that i’ve had with them. We’ll see, we’ll see.

The worse situation is that they stay crappy, I attempt to get a refund for the year of hosting i paid for, and we go back to TrafficPlanetHosting or some other host. I don’t plan on using KnownHost due to the price.

Edit: 11:58 AM – I just noticed the my VPS at A Small Orange is back online and working, so i moved the site back. All seems to be working good, but the cloud command service isn’t running yet, so hopefully I don’t need to restart anything. Seems all the data is still here, and working good. Hopefully the VPS’s will stay on, if not then its back to the shared hosting.

0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x