For my birthday, I've gotten a new web host, A2 Hosting.
I had been using Affordable Host since I started my own web site back in 2002, and they'd been pretty good, but then in April 2005, Affordable Host was sold to dotCanada. If you search Usenet, you can find that complaints about Affordable Host's new management started right away.
I didn't have many problems with Affordable Host (partly because I didn't do much with my site), but a problem last month and nother problem this week finally convinced me to switch. My account's paid through January, so this gives me some time to try to switch gracefully.
The first problem, which happened at the end of last month, didn't interrupt my service any, but it did shake my confidence in dotCanada greatly, and that's because all of a sudden on phpMyAdmin I had access to a new mySQL database that I didn't create. It turns out to have been the tables for trecblog.net's Xoops bulletin board, including member names and passwords! I e-mailed trecblog's admin, and she wasn't pleased to learn that her data was available to other AffordableHost customers!
This week was the second problem — Affordable Host managed to piss me off by doing away with SpamAssassin and implementing Mailscanner. Now Mailscanner may be a fine program, better than SpamAssassin even, but Affordable Host didn't ask me if I wanted to switch and didn't even notify me beforehand that they were switching.
So that was it. A2 Hosting's impressed me so far by having my new account quickly available. I've got my e-mail switched over and SpamAssassin set back up the way I like it. It shouldn't take me too long to get my website changed too. |