Web Hosting Providers

[vdeane]

My website has been hosted by IONOS (same host provider that the forum has used, if that gives you an idea of quality, although I've been on shared hosting rather than the managed server).  Recently, I have been having a lot of problems with things timing out when they shouldn't.  It's long had a timeout for PHPMyAdmin of an hour (regardless of activity), but now there's also a 15-20 minute timeout of ssh (regardless of activity, which makes running the scripts to update my photo gallery a PITA), and this past week there's now a 1 second timeout of TCP connections, which means that all pages with lots of photos (particularly the exit lists and photo gallery) now require multiple reloads for all images to download, making the site borderline unusable.

I tried calling support last night, but they refused to acknowledge that the issue was on their end at all, instead blaming my photo gallery code and image files, despite the fact that it's worked for years and I haven't touched it since last month.  Their insistence on this makes no sense at all, as it doesn't match the symptoms of my problem at all, as anyone with even a basic knowledge of how computers and the internet work should know (if they were right, reloading wouldn't do anything).  They claim "all other sites on the server are fine", but if those other sites don't have as many photos on a page, this timeout wouldn't affect them the way it does me.  This isn't the first time they were just plain wrong, either - a month ago there was an issue where my ISP's DNS system was preventing my computer from communicating with their FTP server, and they refused to acknowledge that it was anything other than my FTP client configuration (even though it had worked fine for years and hadn't changed).  Alas, their support doesn't have any way to escalate issues if the customer service person is (as always) unhelpful, and there is no way to lodge complaints.

As such, I am thinking that it is time to move my site somewhere else, as I am pulling my hair out and cannot see any path to fixing it remaining on IONOS.  In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if they're deliberately making my site worse to try to sell me on their CDN services!  I got a recommendation for InMotion on Facebook, so right now that's looking like the way I'll go, but if anyone else has any other recommendations or thoughts on things I overlooked, I'm all ears.

What's especially annoying is that I just paid for a full year of IONOS hosting a month ago.

EDIT: After an hour and a half on the phone over two nights, I finally got them to admit that they're currently doing upgrades and that things should return to normal once they're done.  Why couldn't they just say that in the first place?  I guess I'll let it go for now and revisit in a few days.