Rourke on Technology

I wanted to like TextDrive. I really did. They have an active online community. They have an amazing range of services available so your hosting solution can easily grow with your needs. They’re endorsed by David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately, my experience with TextDrive was awful.

Not only was my site down over 3% of the time, but the shared host was set up in a way that was downright difficult to deal with.In the beginning, my site performance with TextDrive was great. It ranked among the fastest and most reliable hosting plans I had tried. Just three months in, though, things started to go south. By the time I left TextDrive in May, my test site was inaccessible an average of 15-20 minutes a day. My test site’s uptime was 96.43% during the last three months I was a TextDrive user. Average response time for the main page of my test blog was roughly 1.7 seconds — faster than Dreamhost, but not great.

Usability of my TextDrive account is the worst I’ve experienced for a shared host. The first hiccup involved my shared server’s hostname. I was on a machine named seymour, but I accidentally tried to login to seymore. I didn’t get a “hostname not found” error because TextDrive has hosts with both spellings. My problem was the result of user error, but a friendlier hostname would have prevented the problem entirely. A few of my more serious gripes included:

• you need to contact support to enable ssh access
• emacs is not installed and can not be installed
• web scripts run as nobody/www
• their comment spam blocking mechanism broke xml-rpc
• webmin is the ugliest and least usable control panel I’ve seen

Ruby on Rails hosting is TextDrive’s purported strength, but even there they seem to get very low scores. I’ve canceled my TextDrive account. Despite my high hopes, my experience with TextDrive was the worst experience I’ve had with a web hosting company.