First thing I did last year was to check in on the site to verify that my credit card information are correct. Which they were, not a huge surprise considering that I have not used or changed the data in one year’s time. Next thing I try is to make a manual payment on the Wiredtree Grove website, with the same result.

I get the dreaded authorization failed error on the page. That’s bad, considering that delays in payment of the invoice could mean that the server Ghacks is running on could be taken offline by the company until a payment clears.

So what can I do? I call the Mastercard hotline in my country where I have to wait a good ten minutes or so before I have to go through a ridiculous authorization process (card number, name, birthday, address, three digits of the linked bank account number). I then get the following explanation (every year, actually more often as I sometimes buy expensive stuff on the Internet, have to call them all the time).

Mastercard has an automatic fraud detection system in place that blocks payments that break a pattern or look suspicious. My payment to the web hosting company Wiredtree is apparently looking like a fraudulent payment. The only possible explanation that I have for this is that it is a four-digit payment to a foreign country. The service agent offers to disable the fraud protection for the next 24 hours or 3 days so that I can make the payment.

I’m curious and want to know if there is a way to whitelist select companies, but that is apparently not possible. The system is also not capable of learning from past year’s payments. I mean, I pay the hoster once a year at the same time. Should not an automatic system be able to come to the conclusion that the payment is legit if it happened in past years as well?

I ask the agent about options. The only option for me to make sure that the automatic payment gets through is to call them a day earlier to remove the automatic fraud checking for three days from the account. That’s ridiculous, don’t you think? To make things worse, you have to pay for that call.

Have you ever had problems with your credit card and online payments? Let me know in the comments. Oh, and hosting for Ghacks is paid in full for a whole year, so no worries in this regard. Until next year, that is.

I researched the new web hoster extensively before making my decision to move the website to the new hoster. That is probably the most important step in the process to ensure that the hoster has excellent customer support, servers and connections to the Internet. Wiredtree was all that and more and I learned during the server transfer that their 15 minute reaction time to customer support requests was not just a figure that they picked out of thin air.

I had to deal with customer support in a few occasions especially during server migration to ensure that everything went underway smoothly. Wiredtree was always prompt to response with a solid solution that solved my requests. They also contacted me after three months to find out if everything was as I expected it to be. Support is therefor excellent, cannot be better in my opinion. But what about the server and hardware?

I ordered one server upgrade in that time; A backup server to store backups of all the websites and databases that were on the server regularly. The performance of the server itself is great and capable of running Ghacks and a few minor websites without problems. The load average, cpu, swap file, hard drive and memory utilization of the server were much lower than on the old server. More importantly than that is the fact that the server never crashed under the load so that I did not have to get up late at night after receiving a SMS that the server was down to fix the problem.

The Wiredtree server is not as cheap as it can get but it is still a cheaper priced server especially compared to other web hosting companies who charge double or even more of the amount that I’m paying for a comparable server. The excellent hardware and connections of the dedicated server in combination with top notch customer support make Wiredtree the hosting company that I recommend to all my friends and colleagues. It cannot get much better than that. We (that’s Everton from Connected Internet and I) are for example hosting Windows 7 News on another Wiredtree server and had no complaints (only praise) there with the hardware or customer support there as well.

I will do another review in 4 or 8 months to see if they are keeping their high standard. I currently have no reason to believe they do not.

A lot of research should go into such a decision and that’s what I did. One tip that I would like to pass on is to take a look at the dedicated server forum over at Webhostingtalk. Web hosting companies post special offers in that forum that will give you benefits such as double bandwidth, server memory or discounts on the price.

My business partner and I moved our Windows 7 website recently from a hosting company in the UK to Wiredtree in the US using one of the discounts found in the forum to get a great managed server for a good price and absolute reliable and fast support.

I decided to do the same and order a managed server at Wiredtree. Here is what I got for the yearly price of $2315.8 (second year will be $199 less due to setup costs which would reduce the price of the server by $25 per month for its lifetime which means it pays of after eight months). I got a deal with double server memory, bandwidth and a discount of $70.

Intel Core i7
12GB DDR3
Primary Disk:250GB 7.2k RPM SATAII 16MB Cache

Plan is to add another server with a faster hard drive (raid I suppose) that will run the database eventually. The server is currently setup by the Wiredtree support team who will also handle the migration of the website. It could mean some downtime in the next days but the website will definitely benefit from the new server with speed improvements.

I´am trying to find a dedicated server which will easily handle the load and give us more options. This will take some days and its quite possible that Godaddy will permanently suspend the hosting account in that time.

I just want you to know that we will be back no matter what happens. Thanks for your support.

Update: I have moved away from GoDaddy hosting in the meantime, as it is unacceptable if a company turns of a website without prior notifying the webmaster that it will happen. Disruption of business on the Internet can be quite damaging to companies.

I since them moved to the German company Hetzner who are offering great-value rootservers. The servers are unmanaged on the other hand which means that only users who know their way around in Linux should go for that option.

Update 2: I have moved again. Not because Hetzner was offering bad services, but because of the unmanaged server issue. I decided to move to a company that would offer managed services. Wiredtree was the company that offered me a splendid deal on this part, and Ghacks has been running on Wiredtree servers ever since.

The company handles all the core updating and a lot more. Their support is really responsive and service overall is excellent.

You may have to pay for some software installations though, if they are special enough. You could do that yourself on the other hand if you have the knowledge to do so.

I do recommend to get a backup server (for $20 or so per year) to automate back ups of your server.