Whenever I write about shared hosting, it’s not a good thing. It usually means another host has gone from good or ok to just plain awful. Not too long ago, I wrote in Part V that WebHost4Life appeared to be a keeper. They had a great, bare bones control panel. They really were reliable and helpful. But like all good things…
Recently, WH4L was purchased and their new owners are migrating to some just plain awful control panel called vDeck. It truly is terrible. It is totally unintuitive and offers far less control than their old panel.
They’ve been botching migrations to the new system for a while. They moved a client’s site to the new platform a few months ago and there was an outage of about 45 days. Yes, 45 days. I would have gladly moved these sites after a day or two, but I couldn’t connect to the databases to move the data (than you SQL Delta for saving me). Tech support was useless. I mean really useless. They didn’t offer any assistance. They also expressed virtually no concern for the fact that my client’s sites were down.
There’s even a blog dedicated to determining whether a class action lawsuit against WH4L is viable.
Finally I moved those sites to WinHost. WinHost is great so far. Everything worked as advertised. Decent control panel. Full trust. It’s too early to say much more. But I am so far pleased. They got me by cleverly buying ads for the WebHost4Life keyword (or something similar). Two complaints though. Your worker process is limited to 100MB of memory. You are recycled if you hit that limit. I tried out an app that used NoRM and MongoHQ. That stack has memory requirements beyond 100MB (200MB for the pro plan). That site is in beta and will be formally released in a few weeks. It’s at SoftSys Hosting right now on a VPS. SoftSys rocks so far…
So long story short, the new platform at WH4Life sucks. Code Voyeur is broken now and I’m trying to fight through the migration. Try WinHost. They have a monthly billing plan. It’s $5. Avoid WebHost4Life.