So go get yourself a Brinkster website. Seriously, they're great.
However... like every good thing, there are side effects, and Brinkster is no exception. So, here is my disclaimer: Brinkster may cause headaches.
For example, your website might all of a sudden go down without you doing a thing. You won't know about it until a user tries to go to your website and sees nothing but the domain name listed there. So you will go to chat with Brinkster support and ask what's up and they will tell you the following:
"Windows updates were run on the computer and this caused the operating system to crash. We rolled back the updates that were run on the server this morning. This corrected most of the errors, but left the computer unable to communicate with the rest of the network or go online. We have built a new server to replace the one you were on and are moving the website files from the backups made a few hours before the crash. Once the files are restored, the website will be online. We truly apologize for the down time you have experienced today."If you have an ounce of common sense, you will proceed to inquire whether they sent an email out explaining this because even though you didn't see one, you give them the benefit of the doubt and figure that you just didn't see it. Brinkster will respond:
"No we did not. Unless users were coming into chat earlier in the day.Then you will proceed to bang your head against the desk, thus creating the aforementioned headache. That their server crashes and leaves your site down for hours is bad enough, but for them to knowingly not bother to have a basic system that at least informs their paying customers of the situation is simply inexcusable.
We do not have an email system in place to do this."
There are other things that may induce the side effects as well, but I won't bother to write them down because someone already did.
But by all means, if you need a website, go with Brinkster (using one of my reference links, of course). Just be wary of the potential side effects.
2 comments:
Saw you linking my article and thought i would stop by. Not sure why you'd still recommend Brinkster, there are plenty of other better hosting companies that provide similar service without the horrid tech support and constant downtime (or the other things I mentioned on my post, which you shouldn't have to deal with). Webhost4Life.com for instance blows Brinkster out of the water. Discountasp.com is also supposed to be good and even GoDaddy is probably a better solution.
Brinkster is an aweful, aweful webhost and I can't urge you enough to keep away from them.
Hey, Kris, thanks for stopping by! The excessive recommendations were rather tongue-in-cheek and made only because "they have a great referral program". I had banner ads also, I'm not sure why they didn't show up. If someone still wants to sign up with Brinkster after reading our combined griping, then who am I to tell them they can't? I might as well make some money off them, right? :-)
I am actually in the process of chatting with them once again because they finally got my site moved but they didn't configure it properly ("IIS was rebuilt without the appropriate extension"). So it's been around 24 hrs now and they are still working on it.
If this was any site other than my personal one, I wouldn't be this patient. Also, my combined experience with them hasn't been nearly as bad as yours, probably mostly because I've steered clear of using mySQL with them (and after using their online file editor once I vowed to never use it again). Even so, I am definitely concerned to the point that I will probably transfer when my renewal date comes around. I certainly won't be recommending them to any actual clients anymore.
Thanks for the suggestions for alternatives, I'll likely go with webhost4life, even though their offered webspace is pretty limited. I wouldn't wish GoDaddy on anyone, they have far worse customer support than Brinkster and their GUI is horrible.
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