Quitting Register365, worst hosting solution ever

For the past year, I hosted my search website, Chofter.com, with Register365. As they claimed to be the largest hosting provider in the country, I thought they were a safe bet.

The hosting solution came with some nice tools, and easily installed applications like WordPress, so I thought I’d made a good choice.

How wrong I was. Register365.com have to be the least reliable web host I have ever come across. My website would inexplicably go down multiple times every week!! Each time I complained ( and I complained often), I was told that routine maintenance was being performed on the server.

How often do these machines have to be restarted? I know other hosts that only restart a couple of times a year, or even less, and these outages are announced weeks in advance. With Register365 I never knew when the site would be available and when it wouldn’t.

To top it all off, a few times when my site was down, I went to raise a support ticket and the entire register365.com site was down! If they can’t even keep their own site up and running, I doubt they put much effort into the uptime of my little website.

So…. based on the recommendation of a work colleague, I’ve switched over to a hosting company based in England, which actually publishes the uptime of its servers – my colleagues site last went down for a scheduled kernel upgrade about 8 months ago for a few minutes.

Register365 refused to offer any guarantee of availability when I questioned them about it on the phone, even though on their main page they have an image declaring they give “maximum uptime”, whatever that means.

They also refused to turn on something as simple and basic as resource compression (gzip or mod_deflate) for JavaScript and CSS files, with no reason given. Now that I have my own hosted Ubuntu install, I can set it up however I like.

If there’s something to be learned, it’s that expecting quality of service from an Irish organisation is a very risky step, even from a company as prominent as this one. So often in this country I see “shoddy workmanship”, to borrow a phrase, with no apology or attempt to rectify the matter, and certainly with no one accepting the blame. The IT sector is unfortunately not immune to this irritating Irish trait.

Stay far away from register365!