Fandomlife.net has been moved from Ourinternet to Flinthost. Regrettably, this was born out of a complete breakdown in buyer trust in the supplier. I've been with Ourinternet for sometime, since the site has been developed in Coldfusion, and I've been happy with the service. Recently, they seem to have been doing everything they could to instigate the breakdown by failing in the communications department. That's the sad thing about it from their perspective, it wasn't even the faults, which I'll go into next, but their response to them.

For some reason, I've been hampered by a series of faults on the site which seem to be a mixture of database faults and issues caused by administration errors. I'm guessing at the administration errors as what happens is things stop working even though I've changed nothing, then things are 'fixed', some of them needing subsequent changes on my side (which is annoying). The whole reason why the sequence of events is necessary is never explained. The database faults are usually some form of database corruption, again with very little explanation of why they happen. I'm sure it's not me as the site gets very low traffic and I post to it, on a web scale, at an infinitesimal rate. They usual follow this by asking for my backups despite the fact they have them and the mean time to repair (MTTR) is often measured in a day or so.

The final straw was another database fault (quite plainly one as even PHPMyAdmin ceased to work). Despite this, I spent over 24 hours persuading them it wasn't a syntax error on my part. Basically, four days later the fault had not been fixed. It's a personal site. I have no delusions of grandeur. It being down isn't overly a problem, but they would never communicate what was going on. A request for an update would be an update saying they are going to update and that would be it. Since they always refused to say (1) what was wrong, (2) what the plan was and (3) what the time scale to fix was I lost trust and moved hosts.

I'm glad I did. The site on Flinthost is just an order of magnitude faster. They are constantly highly rated and they are based in the UK, with a UK number that isn't on some fiddly dial code. They also seem to be focusing more on Coldfusion hosting, which is a good thing. The transfer was also very smooth. It took a bit of programming work on my side to scan all content for links to content within the site and remove a superfluous folder, but that is a good thing longer-term.

Hopefully all will go well.