The bigger issue is how Google treats these outages. They take server reliability and speed very seriously. I told the other contributors that we dropped 20 to 30 spots in the rankings just in the last few days. It's no coincidence.

So the bottom line is I really believe Warmpicture is finished. It's just too hard to come back from these repeated issues. It took me 3 solid months of daily link building to get us to where we were, and we lost it all in 4 days because of KTools.

Dan - are you going to give this more thought before you throw in the towel?  is Warmpicture still dropping?

Hosting requires a lot more effort than that. If they can't keep up with it, they shouldn't offer it. I'd say at this point that any claims of reliable hosting is at best disingenuous.

no.
they're probably not even hosting themselves, they certainly use a reseller and when there's troubles they sleep or they have to wait for the reseller to fix the issue.

if you're serious about your business you should consider a reliable hosting, something like Rackspace for instance.

They talk a big game on their hosting page about "lifetime support" and "reliable hosting." But the truth is it is just 2 guys running the show, and they apparently aren't set up to monitor the servers 24/7.

this makes me fuming, it's so normal nowadays for fly by night companies to sell and resell things they know sh-it about.

even joomla and wordpress are selling hosting and domain names ... w-t-f ?
these guys all take hosting too lightly and when there's a serious trouble they're caught red handed and they realize they need a lot of money
and skilled sysadmins running the game, and an expert unix sysadmin doesn't come cheap, nor the faulty raid hard drives, the daily maintenance, the server room, and the eventual datacenter.

i know their logic .. they have customer buying their software and asking them to suggest a good hosting, before or later they have the genius
idea of selling hosting themselves .. and bingo !!

@djpadavona and others that experienced the recent down time on ktools8 (whoever that may be in this topic?).

I understand you are upset over the recent down times (in and out of service) for about a week on the ktools8 server.
So here is information for those that want to know.

The Ktools8 Crash:
The ktools8 server started to crash 1st week of July, I looked over the logs and seen nothing out of the norm and figured it was just a non-issue. It happened again a few days later, so back to work I went at looking over everything, figured it may of been related to the nightly updating of cPanel systems. Next day it crashed again, so during that crash we ran all sorts of diagnostics on it (took a few hours) and determined some system files were damaged. We let the server boot up and run until that night when traffic is slowest and then ran a fsck (Linux file system check) to find and fix damaged system files. After that completed (took a couple hours) the server has been running fine ever since (19 days at the time of this writing). Every hosting has it's downtime or an issue here and there.

Just 2 People:
Yes this is very true and we don't hide this, it is Jon and I (Jeff), and we use Softlayer for our data center. At that data center is 100's of technicians that help us at any given notice. So essentially we are more than just 2 people.  I have been working on servers, computers, websites, and programming since 1993. Jon has many years of experience as well.

Our Data Center:
We don't like to deal with the hardware side so we rent our servers, although we are well capable of hardware related issues if needed. There are reasons we rent our servers. One, is they are in a proper data center (think of cooling, electrical requirements, on demand backup electrical, etc..). Two, that datacenter has direct connection into the internet backbone (super-fast). Three, the data center manages the hardware (less we have to worry about). Those are the main three reasons, there are others reasons but I can't cover them all here.
The data center is located out of Dallas, Texas. All servers are monitored 24/7 and we are notified when a server goes offline. We rent our servers (hardware) and we configured them to what we need to run a proper "photo" store online, and I don't just mean our product photostore. I mean any php based scripts that works with photos. Working with photos on the web requires a lot of memory and CPU. Very similar to the way Adobe Photoshop requires a lot of memory on your computer.
Also just an FYI, there are over 4000 other hosting companies that use the data center that we use, like for example HostGator (those 4000 run their hosting setup just like we do, rented hardware).

Why We Do This:
As stated above, to run a website that works with photos you must have hosting that offers a lot of memory and CPU. Unfortunately you will have a very hard time finding this on a $3 "unlimited" (which isn't unlimited, I will talk about that more further down this post) plan that the big hosters seems to be offering these days. There is a reason the big guys can sell you hosting for $3, it is because they will put upwards of thousands of sites on the same server and then limit them severely on what they can and can't do (hardly any memory or CPU usage). It's all about profit per server ratio. 2000 sites at $3 a month is $6000 a month gross for that one server. We limit our hosting to around 50 sites per server at $24.95 a month is $1247.50 gross. With only 50 sites per server this allows us to offer way more memory and CPU for your site to function correctly without errors. This also puts less load (traffic) per server so MySQL etc.. all runs as fast as possible. That is why we even started offering hosting in the first place, there are just to many clients of ours that couldn't find good working hosting for their stores. I am sure this is the exact reason others that offer scripts (wordpress, etc..) now offer hosting as well.

Unlimited Hosting:
This is just a FYI for those thinking of an "unlimited" hosting package from someone. The famous unlimited plan that most the big guys are offering for $1 to $7 isn't unlimited. No such thing as unlimited disk space or bandwidth, you would ventually hit a limit if you keep trying. I have seen so many clients of ours sign up for hosting elsewhere and within a year they get their site turned off without notice from their hosting company because of a violation of the TOS (terms of service). Basically the hosting comes up saying something like "Sorry, but you are using disk space to store media, and that is against our TOS and you must delete these media to get your service turned back on". So what happens is the client of ours uploaded gigabytes of photos until they hit some sort of "hidden" limit that forces the hosting company to investigate why they are using so much disk space. Then from there they find a reason to shut the site off. Most hosting will even say in their TOS (terms of service) that storage of media isn't allowed (photos are considered media).


Conclusion:
You are free to host where you want, all hosting will have their downtimes. It's hard to find any hosting that will accommodate a photo based website, especially one that uses PHP/MySQL, and one that is capable of creating thumbs, samples, etc.. on the fly.
You're upset over the downtime, I get that, I'm sorry it happened. We do care about our clients, their site, and their business. We take hosting very seriously and we work hard to make it the best you can get for our products.

I understand you take it seriously. However the fact remains that the downtime has been extraordinary. I run 2 websites, and up until a year ago I ran a third. All 3 were monitored by 3rd party software for outages. I can tell you that I have had more than 10x as much outage time in the last month with KTools hosting than I had in 5 total years of hosting for my other sites.

I have money on the line with this business. I don't doubt for a second we permanently lost customers who figured we simply closed shop. The loss in traffic we experienced in the week following these outages was very large, and even today we are still sitting 10 to 15% below where we were prior to the outages.

So continue to take it seriously, and kudos for doing so. But don't be surprised when disgruntled customers publicly question what they are paying for when something like this occurs twice inside of a week.

I'm sorry we are unable to make you happy. There were no other outages after the fix on the 9th of July, if you are getting a report of outages after that date then it is false or the IP of reporting company blocked for excessive pinging. I agree with you that the down time was a little extraordinary since usually there is hardly any downtime per year. However even if you compared the number of hours down for that week to the number of hours in a year (8760) it still puts that server in the uptime well over 99% (1% being 87.60 hours). 99%+ is the norm for shared hosting.

If your company is very dependant on hosting being up all the time then you should consider putting your site(s) on multiple servers with a load balancer etc.. like the "big sites" do. So when one server is down or overloaded it switches traffic to another which has a duplicate of your site. When you get shared hosting or for that matter anything less than I described above you will need to plan on downtime because it will happen with any hosting company.

Again I am sorry it happend, that you're upset about it, and there is nothing I can say to you that will change your opinion.