Hurricane Rita hit one of our websites

For some of my less busy web sites I was using a small host based in Florida, USA. These small hosts provide a great way to have a website (or multiple websites) up on a budget. The whole lot went down on the 25th of October, no email response from the hosts, and their own website was also down.

We had them go down a bit more often that we would have liked since we started using them, but never for more than half an hour, and after all, you get what you pay for, so I wasn't all that surprised. In these past instances, however, their site was still up. Since these web sites aren't critical, I decided to wait a couple of days. Changing hosts is a pain, and other than that I we quite happy with them.

About three days later, I finally realised what had happened and looked on CNN to find that power was still not back on in the area of Florida where my host was located. I feel a bit bad taking business away from them, but hey, I need my sites back up. I didn't know when or if they were going to come back on line at all. Their phones were down and they weren't responding to emails.

Today I found another host for my sites. They are www.skilledhost.com, and seem to offer a better package for less money than we were paying before. Unfortunately one of the sites was not backed up, but it was a bit dodgy anyway and I will revamp it and turn it into something that hopefully someone might want to see. The other website I had stored in the trash bin of my workstation. By coincidence I had just finished some work on that site which involved modifying all the files. Obviously I don't rely on these sites for income, so I didn't bother backing them up as such. That will change from now on.