Bad stuff happens. I loved HelioHost. They have some really good services. I specially liked them because I like playing with software and they gave me a big play ground.

But, they had frequent downtimes. Their servers were always crashing. But, and I thank them for their smarts, they always recovered all the data. So, I felt secure.

Bad idea.

I did not login to my CPanel in a long time. Hey, if everything is running and everyone is happy, why mess with it? But that was a mistake. A bigger mistake? Not taking a backup. CPanel has this great feature that you can back up your entire site, databases and all, to a file on your hard disk. Good for them. HelioHost has this amazing feature that if a person doesn’t log into their CPanel for more than 30 days, their response is – “This person is wasting our resources, destroy all their data and account info without sending them a warning email!”

Wow.

So, where am I now? Serversfree.com
I like this site. 5 MySQL databases for free, lots of features and close to 100% uptime. Good idea indeed. I just have to verify their “didn’t login to CPanel for 30 days” policy and if that works out, I’m happy! 🙂

I will be covering more about serversfree and some things I’m doing on this site in the coming months. Hopefully, this blog will not have been deleted by then!

 

Update: A lot of people have been coming to this blog post looking to find out if serversfree is a good idea for hosting  your site. All I have to say is that I am no longer with ServersFree. They have a great service, but as soon as my blog had any kind of traction, they started complaining that I was using too many MySQL resources. I tried using a variety of caching services, but to no avail. If you want to host a static website or a blog that you believe will be for yourself only, ServersFree is a great place to be. But anything beyond that and they’ll start pressing you for paid hosting. When that happens, come and join me on NearlyFreeSpeech. It’s a great paid hoster that’s giving me really good service for a  really low price. In case you decide to host your blog on ServersFree, do make sure you use the WordPress Backup to Dropbox plugin.