You see Death and Aletia, and you probably wonder what the hell this is all about. The two aren't related, or so it seems. In the past few months Aletia has sagged. They refuse to intall the latest version of PHP, having 4.1.1 installed instead, and that is the least of the problems. The sql server goes down every 15 minutes, only to be restarted. I could care less about the sql server, after all, I'm such a badass that I put my sql connect inside a while loop, but I do want PHP upgraded. I contacted Aletia. They told me they were having some sort of meeting to talk it over. What's to talk over, you have to upgrade.

Another problem is that Aletia's tech support has issues when the question goes beyond bobcares. Heh.

I switched to Aletia because of the low loads. Coming from hostrocket, I can really appreciate numbers that don't go over 4. I don't feel I'm getting the same services that I signed up for.

Aletia was better than HostRocket? Brendan won't like you saying that.... LOL

I can't comment at all on Aletia other than what I hear here, but judging by all the rave reviews they used to get I'm sure they can't be too bad and will most likely turn things around if they are headed the wrong direction. I'm sure they'll get the php upgrade done sooner than later. As for us we have no shared machines that average a load of more than 2.5, most of them being dual proc machines. I don't have any problem with being compared to another host coming from a customer with experience at both, it can only provide valuable information to help us out with improving things in the future, I know that we've made at least our share of mistakes in the past few years.

-Brendan

After the machine ran out of memory a few times, got DOS'd a few times, and upstream problems ensued I had to leave. But I shall make a point that needs to be made: Host Rocket is good for mainstream customers because of the great tech support. In fact, was I to switch hosts, they would be my first choice.

I can't blame Aletia for not upgrading to the latest and greatest PHP as PHP 4.2.x broke vBulletin even with register_globals turned on until they released 2.2.6 - and it can take some time for customers to upgrade their copies, especially if they have a lot of hacks installed. Also, like us, they may have been sceptical of the complete re-write for handling POST uploads - and they'd have been right to wait as it turned out their was a security flaw in the new code. So I guess my point is, the latest and greatest is usually not the best choice.

Aletia is starting to get more popular than cyberwings! :eek:

Not exactly...

I'm sick of hearing about Cyberwings, and think the mods should delete all Cyberwings threads.

Just my 2 cents

I was hosted with Aletia for over a year - and for the most part they were the best host I've had so far (I'm really happy with GetMeHosted.com now but have only been with them a couple of weeks, I'll be back here to post again once I've been with them longer)... at least at first.

Last summer they were very responsive, I had good uptime, no problems... but then over the past few months, I'd had LOTS of downtime (although not as much as I had with Site5, where one month my site was down more than it was up!) and was losing e-mail from some people/domains (one of the people who couldn't send e-mail to me, or me to him, was another Aletia customer, too) and now their tech support doesn't seem to answer e-mail, or if they do, they simply say "I'll have to ask of of our senior guys about that and get back to you." Then they don't get back to me.

They used to be good - maybe they're not making enough money and have lost interest or something. Maybe it's just not exciting for them anymore. Call me crazy, but I want to host my sites with a company that's interested in what they do, and active in supporting their current members. Back in March I sent a friend of mine to them when he needed a new web host. He e-mailed them a few questions he had and they never replied to them.

Another one bites the dust, eh?

-- Jough

Originally posted by KDAWebServices
I can't blame Aletia for not upgrading to the latest and greatest PHP as PHP 4.2.x broke vBulletin even with register_globals turned on until they released 2.2.6 - and it can take some time for customers to upgrade their copies, especially if they have a lot of hacks installed. Also, like us, they may have been sceptical of the complete re-write for handling POST uploads - and they'd have been right to wait as it turned out their was a security flaw in the new code. So I guess my point is, the latest and greatest is usually not the best choice.

Not many people use PHP's upload functions, or have use for file upload in general, because they are shady, and very immature. Having said that, maybe that's the reason why they rewrote the layer.

Wether people use them or not is irrelevant as they are enabled by default in PHP as they are carried out via a POST request.

Either way, I don't think the PHP community is skeptical. At all. I haven't heard anything about it, and I don't expect to. There have been scope vulnerabilities before this, and I assume there will be bugs in the future. An upgrade is the ultimate assurance in compatibility.

Yeah, there isn't really an excuse for not updating to a newer stable version.

Please, give me a break with this whole "update" crap, and if Aletia doesn't upgrade means they are dying

1 - Aletia has tousands of clients, not everybody will be happy, and not all server will be as stable, but they still kickign around

2 - I myself did not updated PHP becuase of vbulletin as well (until 2.2.6), the rist of a security flaw was less than havign my head chopped by hangry vB users :D

When will people learn that the latest is not always the greatest, lots of people still use Bind 8, lucky them in quite a few cases as a lot less exploits and bugs seem to be found in it lately then do with Bind 9. As they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

As for upgrading PHP to remain compatible - what a crock of crap, the 4.2.x series breaks compatability in a lot of scripts, even with register_globals turned on, vBulletin having being one of them at the time.

I was talking about compatibility in general. Quit using vBulletin as an example. I mean.. as far as I know vBulletin isn't part of PHP. But maybe this is just me being sarcastic.

Originally posted by CRego3D
Please, give me a break with this whole "update" crap, and if Aletia doesn't upgrade means they are dying

1 - Aletia has tousands of clients, not everybody will be happy, and not all server will be as stable, but they still kickign around

2 - I myself did not updated PHP becuase of vbulletin as well (until 2.2.6), the rist of a security flaw was less than havign my head chopped by hangry vB users :D

Carlos, do you get any sleep? :D

Why quit using vBulletin as an example? It's an example of a widely deployed piece of software used by thousands of people and as hosting is a business, you don't go round brassing off half your customers just to say you've got the latest and greatest PHP build installed.

Well, the version of PHP they had installed on my box was version 4.0.6 (and it's still on there).

This version is over a year old and doesn't support some of the features that my sites need, like the Sablotron XSL extensions.

4.1.x was a *major* upgrade over the previous version, as it made some language changes (for the better, mostly) and while it may break some scripts of people who used improper coding practices, for the most part, it's a step in the right direction.

The argument that you shouldn't upgrade because of vBulletin is specious. The latest version of vB works with the latest version of PHP, and even if it didn't - and vB was just abandoned and never updated to work with recent versions of PHP, that doesn't mean that hosts shouldn't upgrade. It means that users have to choose whether or not to use a forum software that's incompatible with their environment.

But my point about Aletia was not that they refused to upgrade (which is bad enough) but that they wouldn't answer my support tickets or e-mails about upgrading - even a simple "We have no plans to upgrade at this time." would've been okay for me - I just would've switched hosts - which of course is what I did anyway. But if they had had the decency to contact me I wouldn't have really had anything bad to say about them - just that I'm moving in one direction and they're obviously moving in another.

-- J.

Originally posted by KDAWebServices
Why quit using vBulletin as an example? It's an example of a widely deployed piece of software used by thousands of people and as hosting is a business, you don't go round brassing off half your customers just to say you've got the latest and greatest PHP build installed.

So when are you upgrading? Don't tell me you aren't, because 10 years from now something is going to change.. Or maybe you'll put all your vbul customers on one box with php 4.1 or whatever it works with. I've always felt that PHP has moved in a definite direction, and I don't think they are changing that direction. It's like going back to dunkin donuts after you passed it 10 miles back. People in the back are screaming to go forward, your stomache is screaming to go back, and you're really stupid if you go back. You think the developers are going to fix PHP so it works with vbul?

No, I never said we weren't going to upgrade, I never said never upgrade either. You're kind of missing the point here by a country mile, I never said that upgrading was a bad thing and you should install the software and never upgrade it. What I said was it's not always a good thing to be using the very latest version of any piece of software, sometimes it's better to sit back, wait a month or so and see what happens - The same as large corporates do with Windows, sit back, wait for SP1 to come out, then think about deploying a newer version.

We'll be upgrading to 4.2.2 soon, but we've given our customers plenty of notice so that they can all upgrade their forums and re-install hacks on them etc. before we charge in and break it all for them.

http://www.bettaaddicts.com - vBulletin 2.2.6
http://www.bettaaddicts.com/info.php - PHP 4.2.2

I don't see where vBulletin isn't working with 4.2.2?

vBulletin 2.2.6 will work fine, previous versions were not known to work as well, as you would have seen had you read my earlier posts completely.

I'm sorry I've been up all night - have a terrible sore throat and can't sleep. You're right previous to 2.2.6 vB didnt work on the newer PHP's however a vB upgrade is available and I haven't seen any problems with upgrading to 2.2.6 even with some hacks installed. Regardless the majority of vB installations I've seen aren't heavily hacked - besides there has been plenty of time since 4.2.x series of PHP was released, I think anyone who would have to do some work to upgrade their vB to 2.2.6 has had plenty of time by now.

You'd be surprised at how many people do have complex hacks installed, it may not be obvious that they are installed, but I know from experience with out customers that the average vB has 2 or 3 hacks installed, obviously some have none and some have more than 2 or 3, and some of those that do have them installed have quite complex ones on large forums, so it's a major inconvenience to upgrade.

We moved from a 10 month bout with Aletia. I'm so glad we did too! We are now with www.insiderhosting.com and I have to say that you get what you pay for. I'm not paying for the space on a host's server, I'm paying for the actual service. Customer support, when I put in a ticket it actually gets looked at and resolved. What a concept!

We moved to Insider Hosting in March, I am so glad that we did. Aletia's support was good last summer, when we first signed on, but it was pretty much gone by Christmas and there were days upon days that we had no web site visible to anyone. Why on earth would I accept that? I didn't and I moved. Totally happy and I cannot say enough good things about our new host.

:) Sara

Glad to see you found your spot Sara:)

Thanks Jordan, me too!

:) Sara

Originally posted by jough
... but then over the past few months, I'd had LOTS of downtime (although not as much as I had with Site5, where one month my site was down more than it was up!)Hi Jough,

Just an FYI... I explained this situation a few months back when you brought it up in another thread:

http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=31532&perpage=15&highlight=site5&pagenumber=2

If you still have any questions, feel free to email me directly.

Hi Matt (of Site5),

Glad to see you're still with the company. I actually hadn't read that post from those months ago - but I appreciate your reply.

There was a time toward the end of my Site5 run when there were Sooooooo many problems that my sites were down, no one replied to my e-mails, etc., so I had to move - but you were always very helpful, responsive, and in my two and a half years with Site5 (the longest run I've had with a host thus far) I had some intermittent problems in the beginning (as you said, you had some non-standard things to set up - non-standard for you, anyway) but before you moved to the new NOC I'd been monitoring my uptime, and one month it was as low as 34%!

But it should be noted that I haven't been a Site5 customer for nearly two years - and most of the feedback on these forums *has* been positive for Site5 - so that's a feather in your cap, I guess. But at the time I wasn't the only one with spotty uptime, and for a time, in mine and a few other of your former customers' opinions, you (Site5, not you personally) dropped the ball.

Thanks for your reply,

-- Jough

Hi Jough,

Glad to hear from you. I can certainly understand what you're saying--no doubt we have "dropped the ball" a few times in the past. We have had our share of issues, I can vouch for that myself.

I made you an offer in your other thread (the thread regarding WHOIS information). Just so you know: that was a serious offer, and I sincerely hope you decide to take advantage of it. I would love to hear thoughts on our current service from someone like you (who was around way back when--all two years ago ;) ). Please don't hesitate to email sales@site5.com if you have any questions about our current services.

Take care, and thanks for your comments.

Hi Matt,

I appreciate the offer, but at this time I am extremely happy with my current provider, http://www.getmehosted.com , and plan on sticking with them. They offer me excellent service and account features and so far, NO DOWNTIME, which is reason enough to stick around. ;)

Thanks for your replies. Best to you.

-- Jough

I'm also a dissatisfied aletia customer. My site on aletia is down for hours at a time quite a few times a week. When I asked to be moved to a different server, I didn't get a reply. :rolleyes: