Michele’s Freeminding

Last Sunday, I decided it was time for me to change host and decided to give a try to MediaLayer.
I chose it based on a lot of great reviews over at WebHostingTalk and the fact it’s using LiteSpeed instead of Apache, which was a nice plus.

The decision to change was taken after my old host — A Small Orange — moved my websites from one server — the one I’ve been on for the past two and a half years — to a new one.
The move was supposed to be flawless, instead it broke a lot of things: broken websites, messed up DNS entries, missing DBs and so on. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed, of course, but still not good enough for a company I greatly regarded.

I immediately opened a ticket to ask for help and while a couple of easy-to-fix issues were fixed, one more complex issue with PHP4 and my Wordpress install wasn’t fixed, stating it wasn’t an error on its part.
No problem, moved to PHP5. Unfortunately, PHP5 didn’t seem stable on its setup and I couldn’t get an answer from them about it.

A Small Orange had always served me well, indeed I used to recommend it to everyone who asked me for a good host — and probably will again.
Its customer service was absolutely top-notch: always a reply in less than 30 minutes even for low-priority tickets.
Unfortunately, during this debacle it took hours — at times 12 hours passed — from when I sent an email to when I received a reply –, even though tickets were marked as urgent: my company’s domain’s DNS was hosted with it and during the move all DNS entries, including the MX record, were reset, thus leaving us with no email for 24 hours!
You know, when you have a few websites down, wrong DNS entries and are not receiving emails, you might expect a quick reply, that’s what ticket’s statuses urgent and emergency are for.

Since customer support was the real reason for me to stay with ASO, I couldn’t stand to have this sub-par service.
All in all, it’s very good and quite frankly deserves the success it’s experiencing, unfortunately, though, it seems it’s having a few growing pains.
I might go back to A Small Orange in the future, but for now I’m very happy at MediaLayer: it’s got the best customer service I’ve ever experienced and lighting fast servers. Plus, it seems like it’s constantly looking for ways to make its service even better.
Sure, it’s not the cheapest, but it’s absolutely worth it if what you need is a fast, reliable and stable host, with amazing customer support on the side.

This post was written 1 year, 10 months ago on August 23rd, 2007 lunch time.