As of this writing, I have been hosting by blog and personal website with WebHost4Life for two weeks. You can read the details of my first week experience with WebHost4Life here. This is a review of my second week.
First Week Re-Cap
If you read the review of my first week with WebHost4Life, you will remember that it was quite an eventful and “painful” week. My personal site and blog were crashing daily and several times a day due to database errors. At various times of the day, I would receive a “Sql Server does not exist or access denied” error, “General Network Error”, or “System Timeout” error. I was “led” to believe that I was the only person experiencing the problem, but WebHost4Life assigned a technician to monitor the database to identify a problem if one did exist.
Second Week Review
The second week started off very well indeed. I didn't notice any problems Sun - Tues. The website and blog were very responsive and I didn't notice a single database error. The quality of the hosting service did a complete 180 degrees. After an entire week of “complaining“ I now had the quality hosting service I was hoping for at an incredibly low price.
On Wednesday, I noticed my .Text blog go down once late that evening. .Text displayed the following error, “SHUTDOWN is in progress. Login failed for user '...'. Only administrators may connect at this time,“ which was immediately followed by the following error, “Sql Server does not exist or access denied.“ This error sounded like the administrators intentionally shutdown the database momentarily as opposed to it crashing on its own.
I immediately logged into my help desk and opened a ticket with the problem. A technician responded within 5 minutes saying it appears fine, but if I would like to move my database to another server they would be happy to move it. I said the service has been great the past few days and unless they thought the database server would never be reliable, I am willing to stick it out more.
They responded that they had indeed found a problem with the database server on Sunday and it was fixed, so it should be much more reliable. However, if I were ever unsatisfied with the database, they will be happy to move it to another server, just let them know. Aha! There had been a problem with the database server. I knew it couldn't be just me! And starting Sunday is when I had begun having my excellent hosting experience. It all made sense now.
The above problem only lasted a couple of minutes and came back on its own. No big deal. Thursday, I received the same problem briefly. .Text displayed the same error again, “SHUTDOWN is in progress. Login failed for user '...'. Only administrators may connect at this time,“ which was immediately followed again by, “Sql Server does not exist or access denied.“ Again the problem only lasted a couple of minutes, but I logged into the help desk and reported the error. A technican responded again within 5 minutes saying that they had just made a change to the server, which is why I received the error briefly.
The last 2 - 3 days, I haven't noticed a single problem with the server. I suspect it may be going down every once in awhile for scheduled and perhaps some unscheduled maintenance, but that is to be expected and certainly acceptable for $10/month.
Final Comments
I still think it is too early to 100% recommend WebHost4Life given the huge contrast between weeks 1 and 2, but I am willing to believe that I just happened to be placed on a database server that was experiencing problems and perhaps I was the only person noticing them. Since they fixed the server a week ago, my experience has been excellent and well worth $10/month. I have no reason to believe the database errors will happen again.
I will do 1 more review of WebHost4Life next week with my final recommendations and comments. If next week is anything like this week, I think we have a winner at an affordable price.
If you do decide to sign-up with WebHost4Life and you found these reviews helpful, I would appreciate you using my referral ID of “sarasotadev” by clicking on the following link:
http://www.webhost4life.com/default.asp?refid=sarasotadevI expect your experience will be much better than mine, but if you are still undecided, wait until next week when I give my final review.
Thanks.
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