After my rather scathing report of the recent service provided by my web and email hosting service, Brinkster, I decided that maybe I needed to provide a slightly more balanced view of my experiences. I wrote that blog out of sheer frustration. I was just fed up with the thought that I was losing email. Every time I got on my laptop and wasn’t able to check my email, I spent that time looking at other hosting services. I didn’t really want to leave Brinkster but I was frustrated by the lack of information that was being shared with me in regards to their most recent network issues.
I have been a loyal Brinkster subscriber for over two years during which there have been a few bumps which support has been able to fix. The first bump came when the server my website was on was either starting to fail or someone else on that server wrote some bad code which was causing the server to hang. I’d have to contact customer support to have the server rebooted. After a couple of reboot requests, I asked what else could be done. They moved my website to another one of their servers without any additional costs to me. Actually, they moved me twice because the first server they moved me to didn’t support a scripting technology and I needed that for my website. Other reviews I’ve read recently stated that people had lost files when Brinkster moved them from one server to another. I can say that that was not the case in my experience. All my files made the two moves successfully. The second bump was their email servers. I’m not sure what was going on there. Again, I had to contact customer service a few times to have them reboot the server that ran my webmail application. Brinkster just completed an upgrade in their email system which included a feature rich AJAX webmail application which Mike adores. His laptop is company owned and he has to use webmail to check his personal email.
I really didn’t want to leave Brinkster. I was scared that I’d have to re-experience the bumps that they had already fixed. Had I had a blog back when these other bumps happened, I’d have probably written scathing posts about them, too. I have been assured that the network equipment upgrade has been completed and they are not anticipating any future outages. Based on past experiences, I’m willing to believe them. I have and continue to recommend to my friends that Brinkster host their websites.