I’ve been hosted on Site5 for just shy of two years, and up until last week, the service has been great. Unfortunately, I’ve had 4 outages in the last week alone, and folks over at Webhostingtalkforums are saying similar things about Site5. I’ve only done a cursory glance at other webhosts, as I would have no idea where I would go. I see a lot of technical folks and blogs hosted at Mediatemple, but their reviews aren’t much better. After the two outages in the last 24 hours, I left a heated post in the Site5 forums this morning:

I’m very disappointed with the recent downtime on Peony. I have a Multisite plan currently, and on Tues, May 22nd, Peony first appeared to go down. I let it go and it seemed to be up within an hour of me noticing it was down. The sites were unresponsive, and then they were back up, with the exception of MySQL, so a couple of my sites were displaying database couldn’t connect errors, such as my blog or forums on different domains.

The next day, May 23rd, it happened again, and I opened a trouble ticket. I was told due to several users monopolizing server resources my sites were down, and this was being addressed.

Yesterday, Sunday the 27th, my sites were down again, and I opened another trouble ticket. I was told that due to bots spamming SSH logins the server was down again and it was fixed. I wake up this morning, and my sites are still down, even though the trouble ticket said it was fixed.

I’ve been a happy Site5 customer just shy of 2 years – these are the kinds of things that have driven me to new webhosts over the years.

What disturbs and disappoints me the most is the lack of communication from the Site5 staff. If a server goes down 4 times in a week, I expect a level of personal communication showing the staff is on top of it and fixing it. In addition, in the Current Services Disruptions forum, not once is Peony listed as having a disruption. I would expect that bots flooding SSH logins would be listed as a disruption, as that is approaching a DDoS style attack.

At the minimum, it made me feel better, and a few hours later a Sysadmin posted to mention they’ve added 2GB of RAM to the server and some kernel modifications and “are going to be monitoring the server very closely now to ensure it remains stable.”

Let’s hope so. And sorry about the downtime.