For the past few years I’ve hosted my website with VizaWeb. During this time my site has been offline at various times, but usually came back within a few hours. While this is totally unacceptable from a hosting company, I never bothered to change just because I didn’t have time to worry about it.

A few months ago they had a major outage that lasted a little longer. I still stuck with them. Then over Veteran’s Day weekend they had a total outage. Besides disappearing off the web, they were also unreachable via phone and e-mail.

I could care less about my data. I have full backups of it locally because I trust no one but myself with my data. However, what really scared me was the fact that they were also the registrar for my domain name. If I could not get a hold of them to release my domain name, I might never be able to transfer it to another registrar. Let me tell you, it was a VERY tense couple of days!

Luckily they did eventually come back online and amazingly did respond to my e-mails. I immediately transferred my domain name to another registrar (Dotster) and have now also moved my site to another host (Host Monster).

While VizaWeb seemed good at first, they received a lot of business because of being recommended by radio personality, Leo Laporte. That’s why I switched. Of course, Leo did pull his sites off of them a long time ago and recently also pulled his sites out of the same datacenter (The Planet) that VizaWeb uses.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to put this behind me now and move on with my new host. I’m out some money, but at least I’m finally rid of VizaWeb forever!