During April we noticed that our 2 year old physical Windows server was showing signs of breaking down and when in early May most people accessing the PHP parts of the site (like the forum) were met with timeouts we decided something had to be done.

So we looked around and decided to give MyHosting in Canada a chance with a virtual server plan and with a 30 day money back guarantee it felt like we had nothing to lose. After the move was complete the server was doing well at first but after a few outages and an emergency maintenance (the notification of which was so poorly written it got stuck in Gmails spam filter) and with no self service and slow support we decided to go back to Softlayer. And after some negotiating they gave us a good deal for a virtual server that we moved to one week ago.

And so far things are going really well. We’ve lowered the loading time of the site to below 1 second (in the states) and almost everything seems to be working now. RSS seems buggy but hopefully that is fixed now. Please report if you find something that’s not working.

And MyHosting never gave us our money back because that guarantee goes out the window if you use some campaign code when signing up. So the moral of the story is … don’t use MyHosting.