Looking for a new Windows Server Host (Do Yourself a favor, avoid Interland)

I’m going to change hosts for SciFan as Interland is a bunch of braindead wazoos. Ok, I’m paying less than $50 a month and we’re talking about commodity shared hosting, but still, consider this to explain my use of profanity:

  • When they lower their prices on their site, it’s only for new business, not for their existing user base. I’ve had it confirmed by their billing service. Who’s the moron who put that policy in place? Hello, marketing 101, don’t give a blatantly better deal (there for all to see!) to your new customers. (Let me spell it out to the Interland Klingon marketers: this sends the message to your current customer base that they’re there to be milked and fund your company’s expansion.) I told so in no uncertain terms to their rep. Said rep, no doubt impressed by my congeniality, followed my gentle advice and escalated my complaint to his manager two days ago, but I never heard back from her. Ok, message received loud and clear, I hope you like this answer.
  • Their supposedly super-reliable BlueHalo service is flaky for days at a time without any proper explanation. Their support finally told me to just recycle my server’s application pool when problems occur. Dumbass, I might have something else do to than worrying about your rotten IIS setup melting down, you know. How about worrying about uptime yourself, since I’m paying you for that purpose? Explain how you achieve to get less availability out of Windows 2003/IIS 6.0 than I had for years with NT 4/2000 and IIS 4/5, considering that the most recent Windows Server platform is more reliable and scalable by all accounts.

I realize there’s no such thing as 100% uptime, especially in the price range I’m at, but I can recognize a bloated company that’s not only unable to properly execute its acquisitions (I was an Innerhost customer until they were swallowed by Interland), but more importantly, doesn’t care.
After some due diligence, the host I’ll most likely migrate to is CrystalTech. At $87/mo, their "semi-dedicated advanced plan" looks a good compromise, as I’m fed up with overloaded shared hosts yet can’t justify spending $150+ per month for that site just yet. Semi-dedicated means there’s a limit of 50 customers per server, instead of hundreds on the cheapo shared accounts.
Any opinions on CrystalTech or alternatives are welcome. I need Windows 2003 to run ASP/ASP.NET, MS SQL Server 2000 (100MB), 30GB of bandwidth per month, and decent stats.


By the way, here’s a tip for Enterprise Manager users: if it takes you forever to log on to your database (or for that matter, just to retrieve the huge list of databases at your shared host), make sure to install at least SP2 (the latest is SP3a). Thanks to the competent guy who handled my pre-sales at CrystalTech, that’s another good point for you.
Let me wrap it up nicely for the education of search engine users:

Interland offers unreliable customer support, overcharges existing users, BlueHalo is a flaky web hosting service, avoid this company

There’s a reason why their churn is between 3.4% and 5.5% per month.

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