New Website Host

UPDATE: Thursday, April 25, 2013 – Issue has been resolved and the migration to our new website host is complete. Sorry for any inconvenience.

UPDATE: Friday April 19, 2013 – Last week, we migrated sustainablesummer.org to a new web host. There are still a few kinks being worked out. If you get a “security error,” this is because of a caching issue, either in your web browser or in a search engine, like Google, which is telling your browser to open our website in https when the page should be opening in http. Our previous host was running our site in https (which is a protocol normally received for web payment pages or websites that have really sensitive data, like banks). This was an unnecessary measure that was not very desirable for the user (a.k.a. you) so we moved to a wonderful new host. The only problem is that Google and/or your web browser still thinks our site should be served over the security protocol. Your browser looks for our SSL certificate, can’t find it (because it’s on our old host), and throws the security error. We are working on a solution so that your browser knows to automatically redirect to http.

In the interim, you can simply manually edit our url as it appears in your web browser to change https to http (in other words, simply delete the “s” from https) and then reload the page by pressing ENTER. You should have complete confidence in the security of our website. It is, incidentally, actually even safer than it was before. This is just one of those tech things that doesn’t have a good solution within our immediate reach. I apologize for any inconvenience.

As an addendum to this post, I want to mention that we were hosting with Godaddy, but are MUCH happier with our new host despite the technical hiccups. The biggest reason we are happy with the change is that Godaddy provides a mediocre hosting product. Their servers are slow and our website was down way more than it should have been – below Godaddy’s guaranteed uptime threshold, in fact, which is pretty soft when you really think about it. They guarantee 99% uptime, which actually allows for 432 minutes of downtime every month on average. For several months running, we were clocking in at around 98% uptime. Their uptime guarantee is backed by a “money back” guarantee. Unless they changed it recently, they only refund a percentage of the monthly fee if they fail to meet their guaranteed uptime. I can’t recall what it is, but maybe 20%. That’s a pretty poor guarantee for a pretty poor product.

Of course, getting Godaddy to even acknowledge the flaws in their product, was next to impossible. I did finally get a rep to say, “it’s not, you it’s us.” They offered me the partial refund of a month of service. I claimed that was ridiculous, and eventually they gave me the whole month free. This was in March. But then after 5 or 6 days of intermittent, prolonged outages more recently, I finally decided enough was enough and made the move to our new host.

So, the hosting product and customer service are substandard, which is the main consideration. However, there are other reasons to make a move. Godaddy depends on scantily clad women to market their product, their founder and former CEO is a PETA target for killing elephants, and they supported the SOPA internet piracy act.

Comment below if you would like to know who our new host is?