Thanks 1&1

This isn’t a sponsored post, and they’re not clients nor paying me anything to say this – so there’s no disclaimer attached, but I wanted to publically thank the folks from 1&1 Internet, our current hosts, for some outstanding uptime.

As anyone who was visiting us back in the spring knows, uptime was not exactly our specialty with www.redmonk.com version 1.0, originally launched 2 years ago this month. The platform we chose out of the gate simply didn’t meet our needs as we grew; it didn’t scale well and was not as extensible as we would have liked. Worse, our various hosts were often complicating our existing problems and then going on to create whole new ones for us. We were besieged with a variety of issues on a far-too-regular basis – everything from your basic full site outage to email DNS issues (those are just a killer, BTW). Some of it was the fault of our hosts’, some of it was our own application platform’s bugs, and of course there may have been a bad decision or three from yours truly in there as well. Add them up, and we weren’t delivering the level of service we expected to our customers.

For this reason and a multitude of other factors (we are analysts, after all :), we’d been contemplating a move to a new Linux/PHP based application for some time.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was a hideously botched migration from Appsite to Purehost. The combination of having our website and email knocked offline for nearly a week sealed the fate of Purehost, and more or less forced our hand with respect to a migration from one host/system combo to another.

Apart from the new application functionality (thanks DMG), the most rewarding infrastructure improvement we’ve made was 1&1. I think I’ve spoken with them twice in 6 months, both times more for clarification than ticket creation. Our 1stmonitor reports on www.redmonk.com say it best – I get ones that look just like this virtually every week:

As much as I like spending hours on hold to find out my site’s new DNS information won’t propagate for 48 hours, I kind of like getting the reports above. Maybe I’m just weird.