Jon-Moore.co.uk

Once again I have changed my web host and web server, a change that was not really planned this soon after the last move in March.

There is one major reason for the latest server move - SUPPORT! My last host was rubbish at it, now I’m not going to name and shame here… (UKHOST4U – DON’T USE THEM!) but I will tell you about the situation which lead me to this conclusion. It all started with a DNS problem in the office. I arrived at work last Wednesday to find that the entire company was no longer able to recieve emails, to cut a long story short, our ISP had messed up and deleted our DNS records, during this period of down-ness I used my personal email address to send a number of test emails to my office address, they came through eventually, once the DNS records had been recreated.

The problem was, all of my personal emails had been marked as SPAM by our content filter, I allowed them through so that they would be delivered but then exchange and outlook also categorized them as SPAM. Now I saw that as a big problem, if two separate applications were marking my email out to be SPAM I’d wager that many of my emails may be blocked by other people who I was sending to. When I typed the IP address of my mail server  into a browser, the content filter struck again and informed me that the IP address was blacklisted as… ahem, an adult category.

I was blown away, someone who was sharing my IP address must be hosting something pretty nasty which had resulted in everyone on that server being tarred with the same brush. “Oh well, no problem” I thought, as I sent off my findings to the tech support forum of my host, expecting the IP address to be changed or for my content to be moved to another server with minimal fuss.

Ohhhh nooo, after many emails back and forth with my host taking no action to resolve the issue, the final straw came. An email from my host informed me that as SPAM filtering was opt-out I could work around the issue by contacting people who I wanted to email to ensure they switched off their SPAM filter first!!!

Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but I see phoning everyone in the world that I might ever email and asking them to turn off their SPAM filter seems like a pretty pathetic response. I was even more annoyed when they wanted £10 + VAT per domain to transfer away from them, well there was no way I was paying that, they have had all the money they’re ever getting from me! So I went to nominet and for £11.50 was able to transfer all of my domains in one go to my lovely new host EUKHOST check out www.eukhost.com for a good hosting deal, I’ve gone for the gold package, I’ve also paid for a dedicated IP address to ensure there is never a repeat of this problem.

I took this opportunity for a bit of a redesign and so here it is, my new look website. I’ll probably tweak it a little over the coming weeks, I’m going to try and add a few more pages too – about me, contact form, gallery, etc. Anyway, drop me a comment and tell me what you think!

Jon