donhost hosting experience
We are now sending out a daily (Monday to Friday) newsletter at the office to around 4500 subscribers. That whittled down to approximately 4000 subscribers as quite a few of the addresses bounced. (Obviously these are all customers that wanted to receive mailings from us)
So I could not clog up our email server here as that would prevent daily business emails going out so had to get another server just to send out the mails. Went with www.donhost.co.uk as they could sign us up straight away and did not tie you in to a contract. Nice month by month at GBP89.99
Did not have a good start with them as instead of instant activation it took 4 days for the machine to arrive. Apparently they were having supply issues and ran out of servers. Oh well.
Got everything set up 4 days later and installed my mailer program onto the server. Fine fine took a bit of coaxing to get the app (PHP) to work as it needed some PEAR library's that were not installed. After a few hours of fiddling everything was working fine - had to install wget as PHP was refusing to exec some scripts of mine ... stupid thing.
Horror strikes a bit later when I find out that I can no longer SSH into the box. Just kept on saying "connected closed by x.x.x.x". Support was not very helpful as they said that seeing as I had root access I might have messed something up and as such it would cost GBP100 per 30 minutes for an engineer to investigate.
Of course if it turned out it was a server problem they would not charge me - but if during looking they saw it was my fault I would get billed. Of course they would not tell me up front what the cost would be, if any.
So I pulled a nice sob story about how I had to wait ages for my server - and support said they would spend 15 minutes (free of charge) and see if they could find what was wrong.
Got a call from Nick in support to say that he had sorted out the issue. Yay! I've got access again.
The price is quite reasonable and the machine seems plenty fast - but I guess as with all dedicated hosting services you are "own your own" or "at our expense" when something goes wrong. The real annoying thing is that it would have been cheaper to order a new server than to get tech support to fix the issue ...