If things are so straightforward with KnownHost, I might just take a look and try their services. Thanks for pointing them out, might come in handy.

We are in a business situation right now where none of those is possible. Probably the “b” option would be more reasonable (since the online store is the source of our business), but the “getting there” part requires human and economical resources which our (admittedly small) company can’t afford to invest right now (we, however, as i said, pay much more a month than your typical blog, even within hostmonster, to have a higher availability server).

However, the panic and the uncomfortability are still reasonable… you are paying for a service you are not getting… it’s cheap, yes, and it’s no VPS, i know… but they are offering what I want from a host: a php/mysql host, and POP3 email service.

I didn’t choose their price, they did.

The fact that I have to hire a whole VPS (which is, far more expensive and far more complicated to manage, and would probably require some dedication on our part, or a whole bunch of money for something far bigger than what we need) just to have those three things, because they have unexplainable outtages (or at least, they won’t explain) is enough to not be happy with them.

*However… i must admit that i’ve tried several shared hosting companies over these years (some more expensive, some cheaper) and they are all about the same, so choosing to go with one of the cheapest ones was the wiser option.

Paying anything less than a managed-with-automatic-failover-VPS will always lead you to these same problems, be it $5.95 a month, or $100 a month… so paying $100 a month for the same, is out of the equation

I totally understand. It’s different when your website is your source of business revenue, that is why I would NEVER go with a shared hosting provider or someone like Host Monster or the likes for such a crucial business function.

You need to get VPS hosting with a reliable company, like Known Host. That will cost around $360+ year, but is worth it and necessary if this is an important business account. There was a great podcast at WordPress Podcast on web hosting. I highly recommend that everyone who has an important blog or e-commerce site that can’t afford down time listen to this interview: http://wp-community.org/2010/03/30/inside-look-web-hosting/

I am hosting my VIP sites with Known Host. The reason for my particular take on the down time with Blue Host in this post was because many of the people who complain about down time with shared hosting have low volume sites with personal blogs or really haven’t taken their sites seriously enough to get a VPS with a good hosting company that has redundancy set up.

Good luck!