I don't remember exactly when I started the www.pragmaticutopia.com website.  What I do remember is that it has always been hosted by Fatcow .  I set up a number of websites for other people on Fatcow too, and always highly recommended them.  The prices were good, the service was good, and the technology was good.  All this is why it was very unexpected and unfortunate when things at Fatcow started to change.

In February of 2007, I had several website outages that I noticed in a brief timeframe.  Mind you, I wasn't notified about upcoming maintenance, nor was I alerted during or after the outages.  These were unplanned and unreported.  No big deal, as an IT professional, I know that things don't always go as planned.

Read on for the rest of my experiences with Fatcow that lead me to change hosting providers:

Hello Richard,
Thank you for contacting Support.
We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. We had a technical issue with CGI server.
This is the reason you were not able to access your Web site. The issue has been resolved by our
engineers and your Web site is working fine.
FatCow have invested in a carrier data architecture that delivers superior reliability
and performance as well as availability of our services on the Internet. The hosting platform
is based on NetApp storage clusters, IBM servers, and a powerful network connection.
It is supported by dual routers for greater redundancy and a state-of-the-art Cisco PIX
firewall for tighter security. The end result is a shared-hosting infrastructure that offers a
reliable, secure environment and delivers over 99% uptime.
If you have any further questions, you can e-mail us seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
Sincerely,
FatCow Moo Crew

That seemed reasonable enough to me, so I continued on my merry way.  Things took a turn for the worse in early August of 2007.  My website started getting really slow.  I would occasionally time out connecting to it, and had one multiple hour outage.  I looked through my content and web applications for potential sources to the slowdown.  This slow down continued to get worse, and I started to get error messages like "Timed out connecting to MySQL".  Finally, on September 17th, I was getting fed up and sent a note to Fatcow - shown below:

The MySQL server that my website is on is sometimes timing out and is generally very slow.
It created (another) outage for my website a couple weeks ago.
What do I need to do to get reliable hosting from you?
Can I pay more for more reliable service or something?

 The next day, I got a response.  Keep in mind, my website is unavailable or extemely slow during that duration.  Here is the response I received:

Hello Richard,
Thank you for contacting Support.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
Currently, we are running MySQL 4.1.22 on our servers.
Unfortunately 4.1.22 does not allow us to limit the maximum connections from a particular user.
So, if any customers website users a lot of database connections, it can slow
down the MySQL response time for other customers sharing the same MySQL pool.
This results in slow loading websites, as youve seen.
We are in the progress of upgrading from MySQL 4.1.22 to MySQL 5, which will allow
us to automatically limit MySQL connections per user. This will keep the load
more evenly balanced, and sites loading more rapidly.
In the meantime, we have a team dedicated to monitoring MySQL usage, and database connections.
If a user is found to be utilizing more than their share of connections,
their account is temporarily suspended, pending investigation.
While we realize this isnt optimal, we are currently limited to the restrictions of the MySQL
software we are running. We hope to have the upgrade to MySQL 5 completed as soon as
possible, but are unable to provide any estimated time of completion.
We appreciate your patience during this time, and urge you to let us know of any slowness in your website.
Our agents have been trained to report slowness on MySQL pools to our dedicated team, who can usually
resolve the slowness in a matter of minutes.
If you have any further questions, please dont hesitate to contact us. We are available 24/7.

Sincerely,
FatCow Moo Crew 

I thought this was a pretty good explanation. It gave me a reason for the slow down, and some indication that they were doing something about it. Good enough for me! Its not like this website is profitable, so I can bear the outages for a bit longer.  I log in a few days later and see that the upgrade to MySQL 5 is completed.  Great news, right?  I go to my website and it times out.  It times out all day long.  I can't get on the site at all.  I can't even get on long enough to take a backup.  Time for another note to Fatcow - here is what I said:

My website is down again due to timeout connecting to MySQL.
Last time this happened (last week) I was told it was because you were on
MySQL 4.X. Now, I see a message that the upgrade to MySQL 5.x is completed -
so why am I still having this problem? 

Later that day I get a response, which follows below:

Thank you for contacting Support.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. When tested the latency problem clearly
related to the state of the MySQL service this was verified with Network Operations. On our system,
there are known issues with MySQL when the system reaches high load states these perticularly cause
problems for Joomla, Wordpress, OsCommerce and phpBB (among other applications) that have a
high dependency on MySQL services.
The condition arises intermittently due to some or another Web site seizing too many resources and driving the load
high this causes other sites on the platform to starve for service and they may fault.
Unfortunately, there are no actions which can be undertaken with respect to any particular Web site operating on
FatCow that can insulate it from this possibility the problem is inherent in the use of shared MySQL resources.
The recent change to MySQL 5 is intended to assist in limiting the possiblity of these high utilization events
it better constrains the use of connection resources but, even this change cannot eliminate the possiblity.
As you note, all accounts on FatCow currently are subject to this risk, as all sites reside on
similarly configured and load servers. If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.
We are available 24x7.
Sincerely,
FatCow Moo Crew

Let me make sure I get this straight.  Your servers are overloaded and providing poor service to everyone, but there is nothing you can do about it?  Websites that actually use the SQL services have issues on your system, because your MySQL environment is not appropriately sized?  I guess the worst part was that they weren't going to do anything about my poor service, which meant it was likely to continue.  I decided to respond to this message with the following one:

Hello Fatcow Support,
I have a number of websites on several different hosts.  All of them run Joomla,
and none of them have problems like this.  I've had this website with fatcow for
several years and have never had this problem until recently. 
2 outages (that I know about) in 1 week is just unacceptable.
Clearly, there are a number of possible technical resolutions to this issue,
yet it sounds as though you are telling me there is nothing you can do about it? 
From now on, I'm just going to have poor service?  Please confirm that I am understanding you correctly.

I really just wanted confirmation that they were not going to address my problem, and that I could expect it to continue this way indefinitely.  If that was how it was going to be, I needed to switch hosting providers.  Here is the answer I received:

Thank you for your reply.
We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. As we have mentioned earlier we could not help much
with this issue since we provide hosting on shared architecture. Unfortunately, there are no actions which can be
undertaken with respect to any particular Web site operating on FatCow that can insulate it from this
possibility the problem is inherent in the use of shared MySQL resources.
If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact us. We are available 24x7.

I guess that is a confirmation that they won't be doing anything to address this issue, but he doesn't come right out and say it.  I wanted to make sure we all understood each other.  So we had a bit more back and forth that is pretty much just more of the same.  I tried to make the point that this wasn't an unavoidable issue.  It was an issue of the capacity of their MySQL environment.  All of my pleas went on deaf ears.  In the end, I was confident that my issue wasn't going to be addressed.  My website was effectively useless, as I said in one email to fatcow "Its like not having a website at all."  This is when I started my transfer to another host.

I started by transferring my domain names to a new registrar.  Then, I moved my website.  It took a long time to get the website transferred because I wanted an up to the minute dump of my SQL data.  It was very difficult to get that since the SQL servers were constantly timing out.  I finally got the backups and moved my website to a new hosting provider. 

My new host is BlueHost. They have a really great control panel that allows you to manage more aspects of your website than many others.  They also have support for multiple domains/subdomains, some nice email tools, and most importantly, I have had no performance issues since moving to this host.  Try them out!