one.comI have used one.com since May 2005, they were called b-one.com back then.

They have been brilliant, telling me via email when there was an update and I could expect some down time on my site. They Live Chat has always been polite and fast to solve any problems I would have. Which to be honest haven’t been many times, my site had just ticked over and always worked. The first years I really didn’t use the site, but over the last 2-3 years I’m trying to build the site and one.com have hold up my rapid expansion 🙂 I have installed wordpress and use it as the blog you are reading now.

Though in December 2010 it all started to change, the site became very slow, I had some down times. Few of these I only found out about when I contacted the Live Chat “oh this is a scheduled down time”. The site took around 30 sec to load if I was lucky, no it wasn’t my ISP. As I had friends in Sweden, Australia and France reporting back to me that it was slow. Like last night from Sweden: 15sec load time, and this morning from France: not loading at all.

I contacted one.com many times and they were quick to give the server a kick but the kicking didn’t work every time. They came back and gave me some hints how to get my wordpress blog to run a wee bit faster, this helped for a few weeks.

Over the last six months I have many time outs, down time and a very slow running site. There have been at least four times a technical faults and updates to the server which I were told on Live Chat, but I never got an email about these down times.

I tried many things to get my server to run faster, deactivated plugins, re-writing the php and installed cache plugins to help my wordpress run blog run faster.

I have looked at other wordpress blogs hosted elsewhere and I’m sure that I’m not running too many plugins. Other sites clearly have many more plugins and more traffic than I do and they are running just fine. I know, for sure, that my site don’t get too much traffic at all.

http://photos.woollypigs.com : around 10 hits a day
http://www.woollypigs.com : around 150 hits a day
http://random.woollypigs.com : around 3 hits a day

So you can see that this little corner of the net isn’t really that busy, this traffic level shouldn’t bring one.com down on their knees.

After all the emails to one.com, they said lets move you over to our faster servers. This happened last Friday and after a little warned down time, it looked like the site had moved over just fine. Though while writing some blog post over the weekend I had a very slow running site and even a few time outs. And then today a total down time, which I were told that a technical problem and they were feeding the hamster now.

Over the last few months I have looked around on the web for reviews about one.com Most of them are negative reviews and most are nearly all from December 2010 until now.

If we (one.com and me) don’t get this solved over the next few weeks, I have to find somewhere else to host my sites.

UPDATE: This post took around 20sec to post for only to throw this error:

Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 821192831
Varnish cache server

When trying to see blog itself I got this error:

500 Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, support@one.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

And then I write this update and only had to wait 20 more seconds for the “Error 503 …” message again. I had to refresh the page three times and try four times to get this post this posted.