Web Hosting with Globat

I recently moved one of my web sites to a new host and hosting platform as the traffic has been steadily increasing for some time. At the same time I subscribed to a web site monitoring service to let me know when the site was not working. In deciding the host I headed down the complex and time consuming path of trying to find a new host provider – with the view of moving my other sites to the same host if things work out. I decided upon Globat (www.globat.com) as reviews were generally quite positive and the price was fairly reasonable. Setting things up was straightforward and very quickly I had the new Blog up and running – what a relief! However, In the last week alone the site has been down four times. The first time the web-site monitoring service reported that the site had been down for 33 minutes on the 15th. I simply put that down to teething problems. The second time was the 17th when the actual Blog web-site reported:

Internal Server Error
Process limit exceeded for uid 11102 [24 >= 24].

I logged a call with Support and they told me that there was no problem and that I should check the site again. Of course when I checked the site again it was curiously working again. Never mind I thought and put it down to teething troubles. The next time was the 20th when the site had been down for 47 minutes – more teething troubles but I reported it to Support and never received any response. Then came the 21st. I started receiving messages from the web-site monitoring service “Error Type: Time Out”. and indeed the site wasn’t functioning. At the time I didn’t realise Globat had a major problem and I was simply frustrated that my Blog was down for the fourth time. Web Host Industry News has since reported on the problem in their post Web Host Globat Goes Down and the Globat CEO’s own Blog talks about the problems they experienced. It sounds like a pretty difficult time for them especially with many customers wondering what has happened to their web-sites.

However, it doesn’t explain why the site wasn’t working on those previous occasions so I plan to hold off migrating any more web sites until either support get back to me about the problem or the site stays up consistently. I should mention that the site monitoring service do state that

The error listed above could have been caused by any number of events including connectivity problems in the Internet

Globat seem like a friendly company, had a generally positive review from Clickfire and Web Hosting Reviews and they were certainly very helpful in getting my account set up but with these problems and reading the post From Globat with Love – Automatic upgrade by Rajesh Setty about automatically upgrading accounts with one-off charges gives me some cause for concern.