I’ve gotten sick of “TextDrive”:http://www.textdrive.com for several reasons, and it was annoying enough tonight that I said to hell with it and just moved AgBlog over to a Berkman server, and also upgrade WordPress while I was at it. It took all of an hour. I should have done it sooner.
I’m not sure how permanent this will be, but in the meantime the site is nice and fast and I can finally finish my theme. I’m also installing the plugin that will let people receive an email when new things are posted. Let me know if you see broken things.
Out of curiosity, what did you dislike about TextDrive? It seems really well respected in the community and sometimes people ask me about web hosting and TextDrive is one that I would have recomended. Was it just the speed of the server or were there other problems as well?
So I take it the WP upgrade was without problems? Maybe I should upgrade tonight… Hmm…
I can bitch about TextDrive, since I host there too.
1) Yes, the speed sucks.
2) Downtime. Not acceptable. At some point, I don’t care if there are well-meaning reasons – substantial downtime (as I’ve experienced) is not okay.
3) While TextPanel is allegedly coming, it ain’t here yet – and for now, Webmin sucks. CPanel (the alternative at many other hosts) isn’t perfect, but it’s a whole lot better.
I WANT to like them… but.
Pretty much what Kevin said. In theory they are awesome, but in practice they have interesting customized setups, which is good for letting you tinker, but not good if you just want to host, because a lot of stuff is non-obvious, the documentation is sorely lacking, and looking through message boards for answers is not my cup of tea.
They let people experiment, which is good, but it causes things to go down a lot, which is bad.
Their admin interface sucks, and its really difficult and complicated to do simple things.
Its slow. Transferring files from Harvard I was lucky, *lucky* to get a sustained 200kb/sec. Page loads were slow, ssh sessions were laggy, just not good all around.
I also really *want* to like them, but I think they’ve expanded very quickly, merged with a company in a different industry, and spent a lot of time on custom setups for open source projects and the like, and an unfortunate side effect of that is they are neglecting the needs of normal customers.
Hmm. . . that’s crappy. It’s so hard to find a good web host. Like, there are a lot of companies out there that are basicly reselling what someone resold them. They have images of large server rooms, but who knows if they actually exist. Is this a company run by one 16 year old or is there an actual staff?
With TextDrive there was at least an assurance that they had more than just a 16-year-old running it.
Huge data centers does not mean good web host for a personal site. If I had ten thousand clients, I probably wouldn’t much care about the guy paying $12/month either.