For the last 5 years, I have been hosting all my sites on A2Hosting: they had very cheap shared hosting, and I was very happy with all their services. Until about some months ago.

Few months ago, I started getting some database connection errors on some of my sites. I thought that it could be because of high activity traffic by spammers (I had some spam attacks on the phpBB forums I hosted). They were really rare so I didn’t actually bother, because none of the sites I hosted were critical.

Around a month ago, I started noticing it more often. Even applying policies to fight irrelevant spammer’s requests, I kept having the same errors. Sometimes, the website was down for almost 30 minutes. I ran some cleanup queries on my forums, and every time I tried to ran them, the database connection failed and none of my domains were able to access the database (even when using different users!). I finally asked A2Hosting support, and, after FIVE! hours, they just replied that I was having slow queries, and their automatic scripts were cutting database connections for some time. Of course, if I wanted to stop getting those errors, I had to move to a higher cost plan.

And I did. I switched to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) on CDmon. And I couldn’t be happier. I have installed all the software I need, and I have full control of everything. Yes, it is much more costly, but it’s absolutely worth it! I can manage my software, set custom configurations, set up any scripts I could need, and stop getting stupid connection issues, sudden outages, unexpected & unannounced PHP updates which make my sites crash, etc. Even more, they are from my own country and I can have really fluid communication with them.

Furthermore, I have also migrated all e-mail acccounts to Google Apps (I was already using Google Apps for my main site and I am very happy with it, and I didn’t want to bother setting up my own mail server because I have no experience on this subject).

So this is the quick summary of the events. Quicker summary: A2Hosting was cool but now it is no longer. CDmon is REALLY cool!