Greetings:
I'd never been a webmaster before, but when a group of friends and I saw a need for a web sight, I quickly volunteered for the job. I'd been writing personal PHP scripts and interfacing them with MySQL for a while, so I figured I'd have no problem getting this set up.
So I opened an account with another company. Now, I have to say that things weren't bad, but little did I know how much better they could be. It seemed that any time I accessed MySQL or used a PHP script, the web site took forever to display.
So I contacted my hosting company to see if they could help. They told me that they were sorry, but nothing could be done. Their servers were just too over loaded, and they didn't plan to stop taking customers. I also found out that they were running pretty outdated software (PHP 4.0 and MySQL 3.x), and this was causing problems with my scripts.
After poking around looking for a new hosting company, I found these forums. THe first message I read was back in January when TCH stopped taking customers because they didn't have enough servers support new people. And I figured I'd give it a try. Now mind you, I've only dealt with one hosting company prior to this, and I had very little expectations.
After I purchased my plan, I wasn't really sure what to do. So I fired off an email to tech support and less than 10 minutes later, I had generic instructions on how to setup the DNS information. I was pretty impressed with the responce time; it was amazing! My previous company was lucky to answer in the same week!
I uploaded a backup of my site to the FTP address I was given in an email. Then I created a new databse for my forums and populated it with a SQL dump that I'd made previosly. Changed a config file in my forums, and blamo -- everything worked FLAWLESSLY! Not only that, the speed was just incredible.
Like I said, before I was a customer here, I didn't know it could be any better. Boy was I missing out! I really appreciate the service you offer, and will recommend TCH to *ALL* that I can. It's not often you see great service and great product go hand in hand. And you guys have it nailed!
Thanks a million!