In bad providers we trust… Amen..
A friend of mine is switching providers. Because of the old provider is ceasing it's services we we're moving his site to Amen.
At first, the provider seemed good. First of all, it's cheap (which should have made me think...). Their site looks professional, they have a nice control panel and I see a lot of advertisements in the magazines I'm reading. So, my friend signed up for an account and we started migrating.
First, his site was much to large. That's ofcourse his own problem... I don't know anyone else having a site of 15GB!?. His Amen account is 5 GB which actualy should be plenty for everybody. I started uploading the site from our current webserver which is connected to a 100Mb connection. I've got a lot of experience with this server and we always get the 100Mb we pay for. But the upload to the Amen FTP server was going at a very slow rate of 120KB/s. At first I thought something was wrong with our current server... but no... uploading to Amen just doesn't go any faster.
Second I tried migrating the MySQL database. I needed to create the database using the control panel. I tried to load the control panel but didn't succeed. The page just got cut off while loading. After trying a couple of times it finaly loaded but it was f!cking slow... I created the database and was ready to import the data.
Third, I wanted to upload my dump of the database into the new one. I fired up my browser and tried to log in to their PHPMyAdmin web interface. And guess what... it wouldn't load completely. After trying multiple times I gave. up until the next evening. The next evening it would load slowly and I was happy. I clicked 'Import' filled in the path to my sql dump when I noticed that I could only upload files up to 2 MB.... the database is around 50MB... When you get an amen account you get 500MB of space for your database. But how the fsck do you get it there?
My friend opened a ticket asking about this problem. The answer he got was that the limit is a default setting on the machine and couldn't be changed. But no solution... He then asked againg. He was told that he should split the database in pieces and upload them... Well, I've got better things to do than splitting the whole thing in 25 parts and uploading them with 100Kb/s.
So, at this moment I think that Amen officialy sucks. Their support is in my opinion crappy. They don't offer solutions and their network is teribly, teribly slow. Don't go there.