We have been using the same server provider now for over twelve years, overall while the "up" time (the server being accessible to visitors) has been excellent the support services we have had to struggle with have progressively been getting worse, particularly over the last two years, to the point where they have decided to stop offering technical support and are pushing us to use third party "support partners" at of course additional cost. Now while we are fine with web site coding and scripting, server administration is something else and we have long relied on them to troubleshoot issues and perform routine tasks. This change to their terms have now pushed us to do something we had been considering doing and putting off for quite a while.
We could of course just pass this cost on in the form of increased fees but do not want to do this. We therefore decided to move to a cloud based hosting solution, spread over several different smaller server instances which not only gives us more flexibility to create new resources as needed but to administer a lot more of the essential server tasks directly and easily.
We started this in mid September testing a few sites on the new set up and hopefully solving any problems before we moved everything. However (I think) 3 weekends ago we had a server crash, our service provider initially said "fix it yourselves we no longer provide support" when I pointed out the set up they had given us was so complex that we could not even access key areas (mainly due to splitting the server setup into two separate instances to accommodate both 69Design and our other non-adult sites) they reluctantly agreed to look at it. Some twelve plus hours later they finally managed to find someone with the expertise to get the server running again.
By this time we had made the decision we could no longer tolerate this and set to moving all sites to the new server setup. We managed to complete this in three days, and amazingly only two clients noticed any disruption. We now have access to all key systems we need, dedicated support 24/7 and a much more robust environment in which to add new sites or resources as needed.
So, here we, so far so good, a blog written and back in the groove.
Richard & Mandy