My Hosts
A Word about ULTRAsurge
Here's the part of my web site where I used to describe how great ULTRAsurge was. This was before they screwed me over and I switched to Dreamhost.
Basically, ULTRAsurge is cheap but provides laughable customer service. There was apparently a problem on my site causing WordPress to take up too much CPU. I have no idea what the problem was; ULTRAsurge gave me no tools to figure it out. They did nothing at all to tell me there was a problem or give me any indications what to do.
I was at a convention promoting my comic when I discovered that the site was down. I contacted tech support and they said "it's back up now", which it was, for a few hours. Then it went down again. And I contacted tech support again. I stayed up late trying to figure out the problem, and discovered that some of my files, including the index page, had had permissions set so that no one could read them. The result was an infinite loop Ñ I checked the logs and found that during the time was down, each time someone tried to reach the site, or an RSS reader checked my feeds, instead of generating a few hits, they generated thousands of hits. Each time a hit failed, there was an immediate attempt to reload; there were sometimes several hits per second. So I fixed this, and the site was back up; I contacted tech support to let them know I'd fixed the site, and what the problem had been.
Tech support informed me that they had deliberately changed the permissions on my files, to disable the site, because I'd been using too much CPU. This was the first time I'd heard there was a problem with CPU usage. I looked through the interface they provide, and couldn't find any way for me to monitor this issue, or even figure out what the problem was. (And I can't help but think that disabling the site, resulting in thousands of unsuccessful hits, was not helpful for the CPU either.)
So I said, "you mean you deliberately took my site down and didn't tell me about it, and didn't even tell me there was a problem?" I asked what was going on and they said it was an issue for "abuse" (i.e. the abuse email address). So I followed up with them and asked what was going on. All they said was "you need to stop the script you are running from taking up too much CPU". No indication on what the problem might be, or where I might go for help, or even what script they were talking about. I was under the impression they thought I was going in and starting some sort script that had been running out of control. So I told them I wasn't running a script, and they said they meant the WordPress PHP script, that I needed to do something about robots visiting my site, and that if I contacted them again they would immediately terminate my account.
So the first useful thing this guys said to me all weekend was accompanied by a threat.
I resolved to get different hosting before the end of the year, and spent some time researching alternate hosts. Other hosts would be a lot more expensive, yes, but more stable, too.
It got to be December and I was planning to get the site moved as soon as I had time. Then one morning I received an email from ULTRAsurge notifying me that my site was overusing CPU again, that this was the THIRD violation (apparently there was another violation I'd never been informed of), and that they were cancelling my account, effective immediately, and refunding the unused portion. The site was shut down with NO notice, and they gave me all the content in my sites in a big bundle.
I managed to get my sites back up on Dreamhost in about 5 hours.
Meanwhile, I'm pissed at ULTRAsurge. Their customer service is entirely ridiculous. They had the option of telling me I needed to upgrade, and selling me on a more expensive package, and keeping me as a happy paying customer. Instead, they antagonized me, threatened me, and then shut me down without warning.
So in summary: stay the hell away from those assholes. Do not host your site with ULTRAsurge.