The Trials of Finding a Good Coldfusion Hosting Company

A Testimonial of Our Experience by Scott C. Addams

Listen, I’m not into bashing anyone, but I just have to get this story out there to anyone who’s looking for a competent ColdFusion hosting company. Maybe my pain won’t be yours if you take the time to look into my story.

About a year ago I decided that my company really needed a solid ColdFusion Hosting company. We deal extensively with Macromedia productslike Dreamweaver MX, Fireworks, Flash Player, and Studio MX so we set out to choose a competent ColdFusion hosting company … you know, experts in the subject that could cater to our needs.

After a brief search of our friends and references we noticed right away that nobody knew of anyone who really specialized in ColdFusion hosting. Most did it but only as a side line of their main mega-hosting efforts. We were undaunted and decided to hit the web and see what came out of it.

Basic searches in Google turned out a lot of results that looked very promising. We called the first one on the list and opted to go with that company. They wanted us to lock into a one year hosting contract with built in penalties but assured us that with their service record we’d surely be with them forever. Ahhh, salesmen.

We first became suspicious in the very first month when we had a technician call us and ask us what to do with the “.ass” files we sent over. We, of course, don’t use anything like that (hold the jokes) and were very curious about what he meant. After three days of struggle we found out that this “ColdFusion hosting expert” was actually referring to our ASP files- incidentally one of the most common file extensions around. The tech- and I use the term loosely- had gotten all his information verbally from another person in the company. He apologized profusely and even admitted to us that he knew nothing about ColdFusion hosting. Eventually, they got our ColdFusion VPS up and running and things seemed better. But then came the the Great Downtime Struggle.

We had been with them for three months when we started noticing that our server would go down quite often. Sometimes it was for minutes, sometimes for hours and once for three days over a holiday weekend. We could never get through via their phone number, they didn’t answer emails promptly, and when they did eventually get back with us, they were unapologetic and unknowledgeable. We were angry. When you deal in web hosting with sites that earn money, you need to have someone who can solve ColdFusion hosting issues, someone who knows ColdFusion inside and out, and someone who is empowered to act on the problems you encounter. We got none of the above with this company.

I was at my wits end. With no other choices left, I went down the remaining list of hosts. My company was completely willing to pay the penalty fee to get out from underneath this web-hosting tyranny of ignorance and I had to find another one quick. Having learned from my previous experiences, however, I knew what to look for.

After several companies who gave me every indication that they were no different from the hosting giant I was with the first time, I finally stumbled on one that was different.

A ColdFusion hosting company that actually specializes in ColdFusion? Yes.

A ColdFusion hosting company that has experts with all the Macromedia products we use on staff? Yes.

A ColdFusion hosting company that has 24 hour support? By the same experts that are on staff? Yes.

I was excited but skeptical. We paid the penalty to the digital brigands and informed the new web hosting company of our needs and told them about what had already happened to us before. Much to our surprise, they offered to let us go month to month with them for the first three months just to put us at ease. We were free to try them out and if we didn’t like the service we could back out with no questions asked.

So here we are, one year later, wiser and with a good solid ColdFusion hosting company. We’ve been down two times in that year- once for 35 minutes and another time for 15 minutes. Both times our host called us to tell us. The service is great.

I sincerely hope reading this helps you- take a page out of our book to save yourself some effort if you ever have to make a decision about your own service provider. Ask the same questions we asked, don’t sign without trying, and feel free to check out the company we found for ColdFusion hosting services.

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