Like one of my customers said, "most hosts are good until there's a problem". Nothing else to comment as to agree. Unfortunatelly, choosing a US based hosting for miniBB I still never had a big luck, and hopefully changing it for the 3rd time in 2 years I hope we've chosen the right package.

I have nothing against the guys on icestorm.com, the place where miniBB hosted for the past year, but their support became abnormally slow and unprofessional past months. First, I have reported them that our mini site is loading very slow, most probably because 600 or 700 other sites were placed on the same server. They have moved it to another IP address, and it became a nightmare. It worked even slower, often disconnected, half of our customers didn't get the automated email notifications, because this IP was probably put in the common spam filters blacklist. Seeing that I would never say miniBB is a "FAST AND STABLE SOFTWARE". I felt that this strongly causes the business things.

My patience was over yesterday when some of our users discovered pages full of errors, because one of mySQL tables crashed. It was not so critical, because I've had backup of the site, and it was not the table from miniBB software, so I just simply deleted this table and started it from scratch - it was not possible to recover it using regular mySQL repair command. But after few hours another table was going to crash, because it was impossible for me to post a message on forums, there was kind of problem with the keys. So I made all forums read-only, purchased a swamp package on hostgator.com - this is the new place for miniBB and wrote to IceStorm support a very dirty and emotional letter, where I spreaded everything I've collected by this time. You know what they replied?

"This is a coding issue."

No comments... a coding issue which is worked for years now suddenly crashed the database, provided offline status and did other not so smart things. Whoever is guilty but the server maintainers.

Let's see how it will go now - most probably if I have problems with this hosting, I will lease my own server here in Latvia and build my own hosting plan which will satisfy everybody. If you would like to get the things right, do them yourself.

Good luck, I am saying to us all...

Yep, "coding issue" is on top of the list of excuses of average customer service support...

Hi Paul/miniBB Team,
I am sorry to hear about the problems you had with your last web host. Let's hope your new host will be more reliable than the last!
All the best -
mb

So I made all forums read-only, purchased a swamp package on hostgator.com
I hope I am wrong, but after some time you will see same problems with Hostgator and any other American unbelivably cheap hostings who have thousands of sites on one server and don't care for quality - only quantity. You cannot get good hosting at $6.95 for 50 GB anywhere in the world.

You cannot get good hosting at $6.95 for 50 GB anywhere in the world.
I believe in this case they say the server's hard drive (they call it "disk space") has 50 GB - but not one account on this server ;). It's a clever way of marketing talk. The 50GB is shared among a few hundreds (possibly) sites - it's easy to check how many sites exactly by reverse IP search. I doubt many hosts have thousands of accounts - unless they park domains or something.

In reality I think one average account takes no more than 50 MB so that's why they can still use that language.

Moony
miniBB project takes about 15 Mb in disk space and 10 Mb in database, and this grows slowly, so why I would not use the cheap plans hosting companies offer? ;-)

However you are right - there are hundreds of accounts usually on the same server (never seen thousands) and when there is a regular eBay auction page which is visited 10-20 times per day, and when there is a site with few thousands of visits per day and which is constantly flooded, tried to hack and other things - this makes it all slow.

Our current plan would include 100 times bigger sites than miniBB and I've chosen $15/month package warning the hosting owners that the realiability and the speed is everything I need, so I don't care how much sites are there on the same server, but we'll see.

So, everything depends on how much you are expecting from the site. If it is just a homepage, why not to use cheap instead of expensive...

I wonder how much Sergey Brin's and Larry Page's homepage hosting may cost today ;)