Why should I spend time troubleshooting a problem with code for my website?
Its tedious, its pedantic, and its not my biggest bogey right now.
I should be able to put my website on a server, call technical support, and have them explain to me what the problem is (if there is one).
Thats the stance I took when I started looking for someone to host my website. I didn't want to spend my time worrying about whether the site was up or down, or whether my orders were being processed correctly. I also didn't (don't) have time to spend all day designing and writing webpages that may or may not work on some web hosting companies' webservers.
The truth is, I had a girl write my website and I think she just left for college... and the guys I found to do it on the internet charge me per hour. What I need for a great website is excellent customer support and servers that work with my website design. I need to write a website once, upload it to a host provider's server, and have the site up and running 99.999% of the time. Is that too much to ask?
Well, I went out there asking ALOT of providers for what they thought before I started spending any more money. The truth is, most providers follow the addage "the customer is always right". This conventional wisdom seems to be forgotten with certain web service hosting providers who have opted for quantity of subscribers over quality of service.
The most frustrating conversation is one where I explain my problem to a customer service person, and they say "well, its sounds like a problem on YOUR end". I'd like to explain to the person who gives me that answer that "I don't HAVE an 'END'. The END is YOUR server!"
Fortunately, I actually found some providers out there who are large enough to have all the resources available to answer the questions I had about ALL of the technologies I used to build my website (mostly HTML and PHP), as well as questions about where I would like my website to go and the services that were best for my planned growth.
midPhase announced a gigantic move to the SoftLayer facility today. After its purchase bv UK2.net, many thought that things at the company may be changing. This move confirms the shake-up, moving almost 100% of their business from colocated servers with Singlehop to the meshed, scalable SoftLayer model.
8/20/2008
Marc Bollinger has announced a new vision for midPhase Hosting, removing barriers to entry for new internet users. "We don't want anyone intimidated by the internet" Customers have the ability to choose a web template and have a website up and running within 2 days. Again, kudos to the new Designphase product and the designers creating new content for the web.
7/16/2008
midPhase has launched itself as a new company after acquisition by UK2 in December of 2007. midPhase claims to be the number one provider of turnkey market solutions for individuals and companies looking for a web presence.
The midPhase website has been redesigned, allowing individuals with little or now web programming experience a rich toolset to design interactive web pages. Web design services are available depending on the amount of customization from on site templates. The new website is the company's first major revision since the acquisition.
"Our new website reflects our philosophy: the widest array of easy to access, understand and use services for online customers of any level of technological competency. We don't want anyone intimidated by the Internet. We want to make the process of having an online presence as painless as possible and give our customers a professional site, even if they're afraid of using a mouse. A customer can literally send us text, pick out a design from the catalogue of over 10,000, and have a professionally designed website up in less than two days," says Marc Bollinger, General Manager of midPhase.
DesignPhase is a software product offering that gives customers access to thousands of designs for wordpress, Joomla, and phpBB.
ShopPhase is another software offering available only through midPhase tailored to e-commerce solutions.
7/9/2008
Marc Bollinger, the General Manager of Midphase Service, has announced new managed services lineups for virtual private services or dedicated server plans.
4 different plans of service are now available through Midphase managed services, effective : July 14, 2008
These services are without contract term lengths. Please visit the Midphase Coupon section for more info
Over the past 3 years, I've had to move my sites four times. Twice because the web hosting provider was discontinuing the service, and twice because the service was terrible. There was an outage with one of those companies and instead of telling me the truth, the technical service person insisted that my website was up and that my local ISP was the problem with me reaching my website. I had a friend of mine in another state try to get to my website after the technician's explanation, and guess what? He couldn't get to it either. So, is it too much to ask for a little help when I actually have a website problem? I had to move my site a couple of times before I figured out that some folks are better than others. Where has this landed me? With MidPhase hosting. I have live chat with technical support. I have RSS data from the ops team daily. I have what I need to keep my sites up.
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