Just a quick apology to all those people who have been unable to access this site at times. I'm not sure whats wrong, but every now and then the site seem to be unavailable for a couple fo minutes.

I've e-mailed my webhosts several times and I'm still awaiting a reply. If I don't hear from them soon, or they can't resolve the problems then it looks as though I shall have to dig deeply into my pockets again and fork out yet more money to pay for another better quality host.... Plus go through all the hassle of transferring the whole site.

In the meantime, please be patient and if you're submitting a long post I'd recommend you copy the text before clicking on the 'Post' button. That way if the site goes down for a few seconds and your post is lost, you can always paste it back in once it comes back online...

Grrrrrr.... Anyone know any good webhosts??

Al.

Al, I really don't think you need to apologise: I also suffer at the hands of an unreliable hosting company hosting the Bristol Nomads website. It seems almost every time I try to upload new stuff, it's unavailable. Though to be fair, they've been better over the last few weeks. I also notice they no longer offer the starter level of service I took out with them!

I guess you're never going to get fully reliable hosting at the level of fee we're paying. Once you start to hit ~£350 pa mark, you start getting some resilience built in to the service.

For us guys running voluntary, non-profit-making websites, this is unaffordable (and probably unnecessary. Ok, it's a bit annoying if the site goes down - especially if you're in the middle of entering a post - but no-one's losing money as a consequence.

Leave the website where it is & save yourself the money & hassle of moving it (unless, of course, you're in excess of your bandwidth allowance! Then you really *would* be a victim of your own success

Good points Martin... I was pretty close to my 2GB bandwidth allowance last month though and that was a short month, so if that continues I may have no choice but to look elsewhere.

I won't be able to update things as much as I'd like to over the next couple of months anyway and then my current webhost package will expire, so if the problems continue I'll move the site then... Just been looking at some that offer 350Mbs of webspace and 10GB monthly bandwidth for less than I'm paying now, so that looks promising.... I'm just not looking forward to transferring all the files and database tables.

I still feel as though I'm letting people down when they can't connect though. I know its not a matter of life or death, but visitors to the site will get frustated and stop visiting/posting if they can't get to it so I want to make sure its a reliable as possible. Its taken a lot of time and effort to get the site where it is now and I don't want to start losing members just because of a crappy webhost!

Mind you, I could stop spending time and money on it and get myself a nice new waveboard instead!!

Al.

I use Complia, and so far I have only had one minor outage when the big french ISP shut down without warning last year so that was pretty much out of their control, although I admit I don't get anywhere near as much traffic as you do.

Just keep telling yourself, one day this might all take off and you can become a DOT.COM millionaire