webcosmo.com has grown a lot over the last two years. With the increased number of users there were more load on ther server and database. We had to find a solution that would solve the hosting problem.

After doing lot of research, I settled for hostGator “basic windows dedicated hosting”. It seemed to be the best package considering the price and server specs.  This is the sequence of events that happened during my HostGator dedicated hosting time:

• They took about 2 days to build the server. Thats pretty standard. Although I have seen some companies do it in less then a day.
• They gave me the Plesk Control Panel as part of the package. But problem is if I don’t do an action through the plesk control panel, it would not take effect. For example if I create a website using IIS manager, it would not work.
• I got the site running on the server. And I realized the SQL Express database is not enough to handle the load. The site started crashing very often.
• I wanted to solve the canonical issue making sure that all urls without www are 301 redirected to the www version. I tried to do that through IIS manager, and it didn’t work. So I created a ticket asking for help. After an hour when I checked my site and I see its down. I asked the tech support whats going on. They got the site back on fixing the problem. Then I found the emails are not working. So I updated the ticket with the problem. And I got about 4 hours of downtime of the site while they fix the problem.
• The long downtime because of the canonical issue got me somewhat mad, mainly because they have not asked my permission before putting my site down. This is totally unprofessional.
• I called the customer service to complain about the issue. The customer service person tells me I can’t complain, but if I have any problem I can email to an email he gave me.
• I moved my site to a server with another company.