Host for the Heave-ho

One of the things I spend my time doing is playing with websites. I’m a fan of Joomla and run the valley community website. It’s a barely any euros a month thing, run through a company called HostPapa, who are pretty crap in just about every respect, except for price, which is so damn cheap you do sort of expect to get little or no effective support. And that’s if you’re lucky.

Apart from trying hard to avoid spamming, there’s not a great deal of effort needed, once you’ve done the backend fixing. A plugin here and there to zoosh things up and it makes for a passable community site.

But HostPapa are not happy bunnies when it comes to using server power, and if you do something that might cause a bit of extra activity, like trying to expand the site, pull mails, do bulk mailings looking for a response etc, then suddenly the true nature of the low cost beast is revealed.

They employ an awful lot of what they call security. If you get more than so many requests coming in over such and such time, suddenly they go into oh my god we’re being attacked by web-bots mode and before you know it, they’re blocking ip addresses at the sort of pace you’d expect in the face of a zombie apocalypse.

My beef is that they really don’t do much checking, because as site admin, it’s tough doing anything when they cut you off with an ip block. No ip check at an admin login, admins being the only people likely to do any hammering, oh no. Cut the bugger off. He’s busy, a lot on his plate. Let’s really screw him over.

In fairness though, they are dirt cheap, albeit irksomely irritating. Next year, in amongst a stack of other gubbins to sort, they’ll get the heave-ho. I pay for the valley site, because I get a lot of fun from doing it. It’s a sad-act thing. But I’d get a lot more fun if I could pen code that didn’t get the tits ripped from it, every time the action begins to hot up.

Yes. We’ll be upgrading to a sensible host. It’ll cost a few euros more but I love this place, and the community are only just learning to be a community. The community site is all about helping that, so it needs to bloody work!