It all started when I couldn’t get Movable Type to work properly on my pair.com account. I started thinking about finding another hosting provider, especially when I started doing some stuff with Ruby on Rails and thought I might need a place to host those applications. Sure, pair.com had decent anti-spam software and had served me reliably for 8 years, but the grass was looking greener on the other side.
TextDrive is a company that took advantage of all my biases. It’s a small company that’s run by a very dedicated staff. They contribute cash and code to open source projects. They seemed dedicated to supporting cutting edge stuff. The company was started by a guy who has a cool weblog. The idea of going with a “boutique” hosting provider rather than a bulk provider was appealing.
Unfortunately, things just have not worked out. Obviously there was the run-in over my Movable Type install using too many server resources. (Perhaps turning on caching fixed that problem, I haven’t heard any more about it.) More troublesome, though, has been the downtime. When I originally tried to log in to Movable Type to post about how I need to find a new hosting provider, my server was down and I had to wait. You can’t really say any more than that, can you?
One rule I try to live by is that if something seems to appeal to my biases, I should be doubly cautious before believing it. I didn’t use that approach in this case, and the outcome has been unpleasant.