I joined Sitecloud in December after reading good reviews of the service, and just want to summarize my 2 months with them.
The first week was fine. I spent time moving about 14 websites to them and got everything running. Boy was it ever fast. My sites would load in 2 or 3 seconds, although most of them are just simple wordpress sites. FTP transfers were quick. The reason for selecting sitecloud is because of what they tout as “cloud computing” with a regular control panel. My sites would run on any number of servers, and would automatically load balance without anything on my part. If I got featured on Oprah (i wish), my site would handle it. The cloud would automatically shift more resources to my site so that it could continue to function.
But after a week or so, things started happening. Uptime was merely just a wish. Sites would run super fast for 1 minute, then be non-existent the next minute. There was no sense of reliability during the rest of December, and part of January. Most of the time sites would not load. My monitoring system reported an uptime of 82%, a far cry from their stated “99.9%” uptime. Even this current month (the last 4 weeks), I have had 175 reports of non-functional downtime, with an average length of 6 minutes down each. Wow.
On January 24, 2011, the CEO sent everyone a nice letter:
Dear SiteCloud Customer,
I am writing to let you know about some changes which we will be implementing here at SiteCloud. As many of you know SiteCloud has experienced some downtime in the past 2 months as well as some periods where clients experienced database errors and periods of slower response times from the Cloud environment we have developed.
Despite our engineers best efforts some of our clients have continued to see errors when the cloud slows down. Our engineers have been able to improve many areas of the service but there remains errors which we feel should not occur but which do for some of our clients. The variables which cause some of the erratic periods of slowness at SiteCloud have been elusive to our engineers, which is why we have decided to change up the way that we offer hosting at SiteCloud.
As many of you know I am also the CEO of a shared web hosting company called GreenGeeks.com. We do not see the same issues at GreenGeeks as we do at SiteCloud. Shared hosting has been refined many years and has a proven track record for most web hosting clients. This is why we are launching a shared web hosting service for SiteCloud customers.
The majority of SiteCloud’s customers can be easily, and we feel more reliably hosted on a shared web hosting server. We also provide VPS hosting at GreenGeeks which is also a proven and reliable web hosting solution and one which we have offered to and migrated some of SiteCloud’s larger customers to the GreenGeeks VPS solution. The response from the larger customers we have moved from SiteCloud to GreenGeeks’ VPS has been, in a nutshell, a big improvement. SiteCloud will be offering our own VPS solution here within the next 2-3 weeks however in the meantime GreenGeeks VPS solution will be offered to SiteCloud’s larger customers as an alternative solution.
Today Karl Davids, GreenGeeks and SiteCloud’s Senior System Administrator is provisioning servers at our data center and will be migrating the majority of our SiteCloud clients to those new servers. In the coming days Karl will be sending out a “System Maintenance” email which will provide all the information to all our clients about the scheduled move. The larger clients who are better supported by a VPS solution will also be contacted regarding moving their sites from the cloud to a VPS. This will be a seamless migration, with little to no downtime.
We will also be offering a different cloud hosting solution here at SiteCloud, one which is proven to be more stable however may not have all of the features we have attempted to master in the current cloud environment we developed. We are working with SingleHop as the data center which will provide this cloud solution and we expect to roll out that solution in the coming weeks.
All of us here at SiteCloud appreciate your business and feel badly that service standards have fallen below where we have expected them to be. We are confident however that this change in service offerings, to more conventional services will be a vast improvement for all of our clients. I take personal responsibility for each and every one of our clients which is why I have decided that this is the best course of action for our clients and the company.
Please look for Karl’s email in the coming days regarding the migration.Thank you for your business and your patience for past issues and for working with us,
Trey Gardner
CEO SiteCloud
So now, I have standard “Shared Web Hosting Server” when the main reason I was migrating is to have “cloud” hosting. Even today, my sites have been unresponsive twice that I know of. So I reported the issues and got this as a response:
Hello, there was a very minor hiccup and server recovered it self. There is nothing to worry at all. Team of techs are available 24 * 7 * 365 to monitor the system. Please get back to us if you need any further assistance and let us know how else we can help.
Thank you and have a great day,
Oh, let’s see: My site doesn’t work. Nothing to worry about. That makes me happy.