This morning’s site outage was the final nudge I needed to leave my current webhosting company (ThinkHost). They’ve been sucking ass off and on for a while now, but today’s outage was absolutely the worst.

Not only was the site down, their mailservers were rejecting my credentials, and test messages to the domain were bounced with a “Relay access denied” error, as if they didn’t even host the domain! The cherry on the top of the sundae, though, was that I even though their site was up, it wasn’t allowing me to log into my hosting control panel, as if they’d summarily cut off my service.

Their status displays showed no trouble, and my frantic email messages (no phone support offered, natch) went unanswered (which was very ominous and unusual; their previous response times were delightfully rapid). My guess is that they suffered some sort of central database failure that bollixed both the hosting and their customer accounts, but I frankly no longer care to hear their explication du jour.

Screw ThinkHost. Their reliability has been horrible; this fifth outage simply pushes them past the Marginal and Unacceptable columns into “Sucks”. I’m jumping ship.