[Ronnie73]

Originally Posted by steve B

It's a bit surprising the ISP isn't more helpful. But then failure to keep hosted data secure as an upsell opportunity is sooo software industry.

It usually depends on the hosting company and the package you sign up for. I was so unhappy with the service and costs that back in 2003 I started buying my own servers. So basically I only paid for a cable and DSL connection each month. For what I was doing at the time, I saved a lot of money and learned a lot too. Biggest issue was nearly every three months, a better faster server would be released. There's just no way to keep up. Currently I have a dedicated server with GoDaddy running Windows and Microsoft SQL because I've always had issues with jet databases or mySQL because they couldn't handle large amounts of data and would usually timeout before a read/write could happen. Service with GoDaddy is not much different than how it used to be many years ago. A few months ago I had a problem with my database password expiring but didn't know that it was set on a timer. So I would literally get an error as if the server wasn't even plugged in. It was like Microsoft SQL was deleted. They refused to even say one word to me or even say something like, maybe your password expired lol. The way I felt at the time was disappointing, especially for how much I was paying per month. It also made me feel like if I was paying the extra $200 per month for a support team, that it would be questionable if they would even know anything. Plus after they would tell me to try something, I'm still the one applying fixes on the server. That's why I stayed away from that package. All they do is apply Microsoft updates, which technically can be set up to automatically run on it's own. I think it was only $10 lol.

I wish I knew of a place with reasonable pricing, knowledge, and unlimited options. This is probably the exact same thing Leon needs too.

Leon, thank you for everything you do. You never get enough recognition running this site. There's noting worse than failed hardware. Which seems like was the original issue, which then corrupted database files. There should always be a hardware Raid configuration when working with large databases. Having the right configuration will alert a hardware failure and a hot swap hard drive replacement can be done with no data loss and no down time. I like to use Raid 5 or Raid 6. The only difference is Raid 5 only allows one hard drive failure at a time, while Raid 6 allows 2 hard drive failures at the same time. Raid 6 cost more because more hard drives are involved. Frequent off-site backups are always recommended for catastrophic events such as fire, theft, or natural disaster. I just wanted to mention these few things because I read that you were looking into a more advanced hosting package.