Yesterday, MySQL on the server I host on at Site5 crashed and accordingly rendered this, and several other of my sites useless. I noticed this at about 9am UK time and very promptly logged a service ticket to get this rectified. I waited and waited and waited, and eventually turned to using the forums to see if anyone else was noticing this, and also because the Site5 personal seem to monitor this more closely than their own service ticket system.

Well, 9 hours later things were back up and running, and my forum thread has been "tidied up" so as not to show Site5's incompetence and my childish behaviour - yes, one of my comments was probably a bit critical and outraged, but what do you expect when I had to wait over 9 hours for a response on a simple issue.

And you'll never guess the reason they gave for the outage. Well, in my ticket they didn't give one, but on the forum the official answer was:

The mysql server wasn't monitored by chksrv for some reason and that has been changed so that this wont happen again.

Oh, I see. Silly me, I should have realised that because chksrv wasn't monitoring MySQL ,my ticket wasn't going to be answered in 9 hours either.

Overall I've had a bad experience with Site5 with performance and reliability issues on my particular shared server. I've got another year on my account, so I need to decide if I should:

  1. Cut my losses and bolt (TextDrive's services are looking very attractive)
  2. Bolt and kick up a stink and demand a pro-rata refund
  3. Pester Site5 with service tickets everytime I notice a problem

One thing I know for sure, I'm not going to just sit back and let it be - it causes me far too much stress, particularly when I actually had the time and inclination to do more work on my sites.

I think I might just bombard them with tickets and use this as ammo for if I finally decide to kick up a stink and demand my money back.