Those periods of downtime got a lot more frequent and a lot longer over the weekend, and even when the server was up it was so slow that it might as well have been down. Up to 5pm today I had registered 5 visits, and I am amazed that those 5 managed to get through.

Apparently the server had a serious failure (no kidding!) and was ‘replaced remotely’, whatever that means – I assume an engineer logged in and copied everything across to a hot spare or something. Anyway, it seems to be OK now (touch wood) which is just as well: I was on the verge of transferring to another company if it didn’t get sorted, and that seems like a lot of hassle.

One tip, learned the hard way: if you are going to use a service like Montastic to monitor a server, don’t set it up so the notification e-mails go to an e-mail account on the same domain/server. If you do that, you won’t get the e-mail telling you the server is down until it comes back again. Obvious, but easily overlooked if you are an idiot like me. Doh!

The interesting thing is that I now have a £5 voucher as compensation, which I can use for any other services from the hosts. That represents about 2 months of service at the price of my package, for less than one month of disruption. The fact that I would rather have had the service than the credit tells me something. I just have to work out what. Perhaps that I would be willing to pay more for hosting than I am?