Recently I had to move all my websites from one provider to another, this is always a bit of a pain and I held off on it for a long time.  The reason I finally had to move though was because about 2 months ago one of my sites started acting very sluggish, it was experiencing high load and as a result all sites on my VPS were being quite unresponsive and I was getting a couple of hours of downtime a day – not acceptable.

I spoke to the hosts to see if there was anything they would suggest, I explained how I was unhappy with the amount of downtime given all sites are straightforward CMS driven sites with optimisations in place to try and reduce server load.  They said the only way forward was to move to a cloud based server, which I agreed to and paid for.

Pretty much from the day and hour of the move things were not right with my sites, the main site on my server is a football betting site that received around 7000 hits a day – nothing massive, but enough that I don’t want to lose them! The load on the server was at a constant 4 when it was idle (the lowest I every saw it was at 2.3 and that was with Apache and MySQL turned off) and during times of any traffic it would shoot up to around 13-15, crashing out when it hit around 17.

As I say, this went on for a couple of months, almost daily I was onto support for one thing or another trying to get this resolved, I ended up shelling out for more RAM and all through this I kept on asking them what the issue could be and kept on getting told it was just the Footy Tipster getting too much traffic. I must have had 30 conversations being told the exact same non-information over and over again.

Anyway, long story short I have now moved hosts onto a smaller and cheaper server and the load barely hits 1, sites are responding in times you would expect and my general stress level has decreased. A massive thanks to Big Wet Fish for that!

That is some background, now onto my open letter.

Dear EUKHost,

Since you failed to respond to any of my emails that included the following I figured I would post it publicly and allow you to respond via the comments;

I am moving things away from eUKHost because over the past couple of months I have received a sub-standard service which has cost me money, both in terms of having to spend more of it, and lost revenue from my websites.

I have a list of things that have happened;

• Waiting over 6 hours to hear back on a support ticket (about all sites being offline)
• Sending emails that include the line ‘You have my permission to restart the machine’ and getting a reply back saying ‘Can we restart the machine?’
• Being miss-sold a server solution to ‘fix’ my issues.
• Being miss-sold upgrades to the server to ‘fix’ the issues.
• Being told the same thing over and over again by techs who seemingly didn’t want to listen. Yes I have optimised the tables, yes I know it is experiencing high load.
• The process to change IPS tags was painful- first I get an email saying the request has to be from the registered email address (it was) and now you want me to explain myself, all the while what I want to do is being held up by you guys.

I genuinely feel I have been wronged by your service – I have been a member of yours for several years and even convinced a company I worked for to buy a dedicated host with you guys, what the hell has happened.

You need to sort out your support system to allow you to see old tickets so you don’t cover old ground again and again.

I am not the first customer who has left due to shitty service, and I certainly won’t be the last.

Thanks,
Toby Osbourn