What Everybody Ought to Know About MidPhase Hosting
Written by: Don Miller
Posted on January 26, 2008
Filed Under Starting your Online Business
Many of my regular readers know the trials and tribulations my hosting has caused me. Finally after weeks and months of frustration I have transferred to another company, Blue Host, and my blog and my disposition is back in its happy place for the time being. Gone are the endless times spent on ignore, some call it hold, all of which proved to be fruitless and in vain.
I started this blog in earnest in September of 2007. My initial purchase of the site was made through a third party who essentially re-sold me MidPhase Hosting. Seemed rather harmless at first, as I was inclined to believe at that time that hosting was hosting. I found out I couldn’t be more wrong. The lessons we learn in this business can sometimes rough.
I am going to put this one in that category.
Shortly after beginning to post to my blog I redirected my main site to my blog. My site went down often, and I would call or submit a support ticket to MidPhase. Usually the response was slow and frustrating. For the purposes of this article I went back into my e-mail and counted over 50 emails, many were structured just like these.
Dear Donald,
After careful review of this ticket, we have decided that you could be better assisted in another department within our company.
For this reason, we are transferring your ticket. Please expect a short period of time where this ticket is not updated, as it is queued up at its destination.
We make every effort possible to take care of every ticket as quickly as we can. We will contact you shortly.
Thank you for understanding,
Hmm, seems rather odd doesn’t it? Let me translate this one for you, “I have no idea how to fix your problem, so I’m passing the buck, good luck sucker
That one was followed by this beauty
Our Integration department will help you resolve this issue, they
are here Monday-Friday 9-5 central time. At this time I will flag your
ticket to that department and they will respond to you on the next business
day. If you do not receive a response within 24 hours of the next business
day you could call our billing department directly to get further
assistance. We work with our affiliates to help our customers get started.
You can also contact the affiliate directly and they could help you get your
site up and running.Let me know if you need anything else.
Thank you.
Translated, look dude we are too busy to help you right now, you are small potatoes to us, and we will get to you first thing Monday morning. Folks by this time I was on tilt, as you might imagine, sure my blog was only getting 50 page views a day, but damn I wanted them to come back. This ticket was eventually resolved, and being the patient type of person I can be I moved forward. Then without warning as is always the case my site went down again. In a panic I emailed and called again,
They responded
Hello,
I’m currently investigating the problem. Please wait, I’ll let you know when I find anything.Thank you.
And then followed up,
Hello,
Sorry, but I’m not sure how it could work before… There is no setting for your blog at all. All the fields (db_host, name and pass) are empty in the wp_config.php
There must be localhost, the dbname, db_user you created..Please adivse..
Thank you.
Translation, look you dummy we don’t know how but you screwed something up and I mean bad But hey they were communicating even if it was hours later, I then received more information then I could handle
Hello,
I’m afraid you might be asking the wrong company your questions. We provide
your web hosting, which means we provide space on our servers to store your
website and allow people to view it from the internet. We also offer technical
support in relation to those services. We do not, however, deal with
marketing or web design. It appears that you signed up through one of the affiliate companies
that recommend our services. I’m sorry but we do not have access to the
login/password for your affiliate site please contact them. If you are
having problems setting up email services or accessing your control panel,
please contact us and we would be happy to work with you on these issues. If you
are experiencing difficulties with your new website, please contact the web
designers as we do not have any control over the design or marketing issues.
I would be more than happy to do anything I can help you with any issues
you’re having with your web hosting so please let me know if I may be of assistance.You can do this through the control panel that your website
your affiliate site provides. We provide web hosting and everything on
your account appears to be up and running from this end. We do not handle
website design or marketing.If you have questions regarding your web hosting we would be happy to answer
them for you
According to the mysql_host your BLOG uses, the databases are located on the server of one of affiliate companies that recommends our services. And it appears there is something wrong with the mysql servers or db_settings on your account. So you should contact them with this problem.
We talked more and it was determined that my site was on two different servers, but the good news was blog was on the Midphase server. Make sense? It didn’t to me, but again they responded
Hello Donald,
I restored your folders /blog and /wordpress from our backup.
And now your site is working fine for me.
Please let me know if you need our help.Thank you.
Translation, heck no we are not taking responsibly for this one. There is a third party involved. I tried contacting that third party in October by phone which was disconnected and by email. I’m still waiting for response. I decided I wanted a related post plug-in for my site. Seems rather easy except that some tables needed to be altered to make it work. Seemed a rather easy request. More e-mails
Hello,
Do you need to edit some tables in your database? The configuration file of your blog contains all the information to access its database. You can get the info there..
Also you can edit the databases via your control panel -> Mysql databases -> PhpMyAdminPlease let me know if you need more help.
Thank you
My response was detailed and specific as it was copied right off the plug-in page,
This is what I need to do, I can’t find wp blog anywhere on database,
*** SETUP INSTRUCTIONS ***
1. Upload the plugin file (related-posts.php) to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory and activate it.
2. a) You will notice a “Related Posts Options” tab under your “Plugins” tab. If this is your first time installing this plugin please click the link for index table setup script at the bottom of the options page. You only need to do this once when you install the plugin for the first time. If automatic setup fails (can happen and may not even be my fault) read on …
b) If automatic creation of a full text index fails. You will have to set it up manually. Don’t worry it’s not hard. Just open your database in phpMySQLadmin and run the following command (cut & paste):
ALTER TABLE `wp_posts` ADD FULLTEXT `post_related` (
`post_name` ,
`post_content`
)
Note: You may have to change wp_posts to something else if you are using a different prefix, which is common when you have multiple WP installs running of the same database.
3. Put <?php related_posts(); ?> somewhere in your WP loop, et voila!
Midphase responded again
Hello Donald.
You can check/set your MySQL database for WordPress login info here:
/public_html/blog/wp-config.php
Hope this helps.
Thank you
Again I was patient,
No it does not, and once again your support department has provided me with no viable answers, I do not need my login I need to access the database to edit table.
Don
Enough was enough I and decided to transfer my hosting to Blue Host. That sounded a whole lot easier to accomplish then dealing with incompetence and careless disregard for my business.
I would need a copy of my database. As it turns out they told me they didn’t have it, although they had no issues resolving and restoring it when they needed to. I downloaded plug-in and basically took my own data base off the server, but hey were not finished giving me the runaround. I asked that this transfer be expedited and they suggested I call eNom who was my Registrar. I did and asked if I could expedite the transfer in anyway. The young lady I talked to said of course, but I couldn’t do it. Huh? , that request would have to be made by MidPhase. Here we go again. I called MidPhase and they told me I needed to contact eNom. My blood pressure is already under a doctor’s care and I felt as if I would be in need of a visit if I didn’t get some results soon. I decided some of these things were out of my control. 8 days after my request in the wee hours of the night, my site went down and I was happy. Why? Because it meant I was free from the idiots at MidPhase and successfully transferred to Blue Host.
I called Blue Host Support and the difference was amazing. I spoke with Michael and John on different occasions. The night of the transfer Michael, who was well aware of my previous issues tried in vain to upload my database. He told me this is not something they normally do but in light of my recent plight he was going to work on it. He told me he was not the resident WordPress guru, but a person he knew could fix it was working that night. He said he was involved in another project. He asked me to wait until morning as we were talking at 3 AM. If it wasn’t fixed by then, we would do something else. I woke at 9Am that morning to find my site functional and working. My images were missing but I corrected that quickly with a folder I had saved in case of such an event. My related post plug-in was installed in minutes. I have full access to my data base. I was able to construct an index page as suggested to me that links to my blog. I’m told Google doesn’t like redirects so hopefully we have satisfied that need. The page was created and uploaded in less than 5 minutes. Folks I suspect there are people out there that think MidPhase is the best thing since sliced bread. Chris Pearson at Persononified.com seems to like them. For the record I don’t. Put simply, if MidPhase was the only hosting company left on the planet, I would close up shop and try my hand at a different business.
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Tags:, domains, home based business, hosting
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What Everybody Ought to Know About MidPhase Hosting…
Well now this is the second time I have posted this and its because i took a stupid pill earlier tonight and the previous entry was gone along with a nice Stumble. Life is blogging I guess, but here I detail a horror story with my former hosting compan…
I was wondering when someone would get around to reviewing Midphase. They’ve been begging for it. Like you I went to Blue Host after a year of frustration. I actually started having flashbacks as I was reading your post. Stumbled you too.
Clara , you should have seen my first draft of the review, my girlfriend talked me out of it, telling me to “stop it, that not who you are” was good therapy though, lol
I’ve also had my share of problems with MidPhase and their third-party companies (ANHosting, in my case). All in all, the 99.9% uptime I was promised last year actually averaged around 95.7% and there was no reasonable excuse for such a thing. Sure, they said they were migrating servers and whatnot, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do these things. When something as simple as a WordPress blog goes down for three business days (like mine did) just because you’re moving a computer … well, something tells me the SysAdmin isn’t certified to use Notepad, let alone administer an entire Unix-based network.
On the plus side, since the company was purchased by a UK hosting company a few months back, all of the problems have essentially disappeared. This is good news for me as I still have another 10 months with them. I considered switching over to BlueHost or MeidaTemple, but couldn’t justify throwing away over a year’s worth of prepaid hosting
Glad to see that your site is up and here to stay, though
Jason I love it when you stop by , always pertinent comments, do so more often, last night I tired to update my WordPress and everything disappeared , that wasn’t fun as my original post on this subject was lost, My email isn’t being forwarded to me so I still need to work on that , there is one major difference thus far , I can talk to someone on the phone 24/7 who seems interested in resolving my issues. thats a big plus for me. I frankly didnt notice much difference in the change in ownership, but I hope its better for anyone on their system.
Jason-
When you’re ready to move, give yourself a month headstart to deal with domain headaches and such. Unless you’re a pro, hire an experienced one to backup and move your sites. Once everything is backed up, don’t generate new content, it will just get lost in the shuffle. Just a word of advice from someone who has been there and done that.
Also, I know everyone likes GoDaddy and I’ve used them too, but I find it less of a headache to register and host with the same company. Lastly, two benefits of going with Bluehost is that they do the privacy thing for free, you don’t have to pay extra to have your registration info blocked and one click install of WordPress. Did I say I luv Bluehost?
My MidPhase hosting is due for renewal next month. I’ve not had major problems, but there are irritations. This post has made me look seriously at changing. David
[...] I have detailed my hosting issues ad nauseam it seems, but felt that was good place to start. After learning my IP address was being shared by some undesirables, I quickly secured a dedicated IP address and looked for new hosting and moved my site to Blue Host. I began deleting anything on my site that looked like it would be an issue. I removed my featured sites until I could add no-follows. I had actually had a Pay Per Post ad on my site for weeks, but had never participated in their program. The same situation existed with Review Me. I had promoted Text Link Ads at one point and all kinds of ideas were running through my head. I continued cleaning up everything I could think of that may have been an issue with Google. [...]