Very Frustrating Coming From Shared Hosting.

I write this as my site has been down for some 11 hours now and need a way to calm down while I wait for my new host to get my account "up".

I've used shared hosting since 1995 up until just a month ago. I was always happy with shared hosting. Who can beat $5 a month to have your site up and running? I had all the subdomains I needed and I even had cPanel. Tech support was fantastic. My accounts were ALWAYS set up within 2 hours tops. Life is good.

Then a recent .com I built got too popular too fast and one day I found (even though I was at 75% of my allotted bandwidth for the month) the plug pulled on my site because (even though it was a static site - html and images only) I was taking up too many "cycles". Too bad cycles aren't something advertised when selling a site to a customer. They made the big mistake of not offering me a VPS soultion from my pitiful little shared hosting account, or any other alternative. So I left them, I had no choice as I couldn't trust them any more.

I got a VPS account, which I must say is not an easy thing to shop for because how do you know who is good? Forums are not a 100% indicator and I don't know any better so it's a crap shoot really. So I looked for the most important qualities: it had to be a managed account because I don't know my butt from a hole in the ground when it comes to running a server (I'm the kind of customer who will tell you "you handle the server voodoo, and let me worry about the content on it ok?"), and I needed a quick setup because my site was already dead in the water.

I picked my first VPS host and all seemed good. My server was fully running in about 2 hours. Once I got through the growing pains of getting various things configured (which I didn't do I aksed for this to be done via trouble tickets) everything was set. The only issue that cropped up here and there was downtime. So now I'm shopping for my second VPS host. I just spent even more money than at my last host and what has my experience been thus far?

I will admit I signed up around 2.am. because my site went down at 11p.m. at my previous host so I was in full panic mode. I plunked down the cash and got an automated email saying how my account must be "verified" over the phone. Fine I wait up an hour or so and finally fall asleep when no call is received. I wake up around 10a.m. and have another email from the new host saying how they couldn't get in touch with me on my phone to "verify" me. I check my phone. Nope, no missed calls, no messages. WTF? So I call them. They have my correct number. Could their call have just never registered on my phone? Is there a black hole for phone calls?

They "verify" me by making me repeat info already provided when I signed up. I've never had a host do this to me, this is ridiculous and a waste of time on everyone's part. Stop. It's a waste of time. If was going to steal someone's credit card I'd buy something a heck of a lot more exciting than a Unix web hosting account at 2a.m.

They tell me I'll get an email with my account info. Great. I wait and wait and nothing arrives. It's almost 10 hours now since my site has gone dark. I write the company to say where is that email so I can get going? I get a quick response that says new account take 8-24 hours to set up. Where the heck was this mentioned on the site when I signed up? Why is this important fact hidden? I"m spending $90 a month, I guess my business isn't important enough to rate better service. Unless a whole bunch of people just signed up for more expensive plans than me at the same time, why can I not get "set up" faster?

So now I wait. I'm crossing my fingers this host will be great. Felt good to rant, I'm more relaxed.