Fish & Monkeys

We’ve encountered a few headaches in the past few days. Mher, a web hosting company, sent us a notice that they were canceling their services. Unfortunately, we have over half a dozen sites, some ours and some belonging to clients, that are hosted with them. The lure of using Mher when we first began using it two years ago was that for only $10 to $20 a year, you could get fast and usually reliable service with decent amount of webspace. We were pleased with the value after a year and recommended it to some of our clients who didn’t want to spend much on web hosting. Unfortunately, the cheap price caught up with us. We used to casually joke that Mher might be a couple of servers running out of someone’s basement. When a service interruption occurred about a year ago, we sent multiple emails to the company asking for support. Not even a single answer came our way, but we soon forgot as service came back online. This past week, the way in which the company went about announcing the closing of its business was extremely unprofessional. We first received an email from 2checkout.com, its credit card processing merchant service, that the recurring subscription plan we had with Mher had been canceled. We were confused and tried to visit the Mher site only to find it gone - only a blank white screen. I emailed support asking what the issue was and finally, a day later, we received a generic response - no apologies whatsoever - that web hosting would be discontinued and that we would have 3 weeks to back up everything.

Luckily, in the past six months, we’ve used much bigger and more expensive web hosts such as Dreamhost and Media Temple for ourselves and our clients. While we sometimes get frustrated with the slow server speeds, we know that the extra amount we pay ensures us support and professionalism. For example, when service was interrupted last year on Dreamhost, we learned from their company blog that a fire had occurred in one of their server facilities but that data would not be lost and that things would be back to normal ASAP. Although we wondered how a fire could have occurred, we felt assured and appreciated the full disclosure. Hunting for value is a good thing to do, especially for businesses that need to save on costs. The important thing to remember, however, is that some things just can’t or shouldn’t be decided solely on the basis of the cost.