It can only have been shortly after the founding of gradwell.com that I opened a Developer hosting account with them. For the best part of 8 years they were technically the most clueful hosting company you could wish for. They had their problems from time to time but communication with their customers was always excellent and any failing on their part was readily admitted and consequently forgiven. However, over the last couple of years things have been deteriorating and slowly the original customer base has been leaving them. Here’s what another original customer of gradwell wrote a couple of weeks ago, he expresses everything I feel but in a better way than I can.

“I’ve decided that gradwell is too unreliable, too flaky, too unfinished to offer a serious service any more. It seems that every time I come to make a formal change in some aspect of my gradwell usage the framework has since changed and now there are new settings, something stopped being supported, documentation is out of date, you don’t do that thing like that any more. I’m sick and tired of it. ”

I’ve now opened an account with tsohost.com and they are everything gradwell were 10 years ago! Tech Support answer the ‘phone within a couple of rings, the longest I’ve waited for an e-mail response has been 8 minutes. And they guarantee 99.9% uptime by refunding the full cost of each month’s hosting in which 99.9% uptime is not achieved. If gradwell offered the same guarantee I’d not have paid them a penny in 2010!

Now to the fingers crossed bit, I’ve got to move the blog from gradwell to tsohost. I’m not looking forward to it but it’s got to be done, if things go quiet for a bit my feet will be paddling like hell below the water line :-)