Pagely

Terrible. We hosted ~25 websites with them at a whopping $500 a month for multiple months and encountered nothing but problems. It literally started with the migration of our sites when they for some reason, can’t quite figure out how to use the Search & Replace function inside the database properly.

We had a lot of downtime and when we asked them to investigate, they would do a half-a**ed job, ask our team to do it, or simply are clueless/incompetent (some of the causes included their tech-stack, outdated software, and poor management of our resources…) Their support team would ping-pong us among themselves which resulted in diffused responsibility and accountability (there were times their own team members contradicted themselves.

Hosting with them has been frustrating and costly – we spent quite a few man hours dealing with all of the errors we encountered, furthermore, we lost a lot of changes our team was making to our various websites because we experienced database connection issues. This was the last straw… and to illustrate how tone-deaf they are, this is how they excused themselves (bear in mind that we lost a lot of man-hours as a result of the database connection issue…) They are blaming Amazon for the database issue as if that somehow is supposed to excuse them.

We’ve since moved away from Pagely and do NOT recommend them whatsoever. Terrible company that pretends to be cutting-edge and charge you for it but can’t get their act together.

=== Response from one of their customer support managers ===
The issues with this database server have been a real pain point for us too, and a rather frustrating one. We’ve actually been actively working behind the scenes to address the issue, and AWS has unfortunately been a little unhelpful in diagnosing or fixing the problem, resulting in a decision made this week to abandon the DB server entirely because it’s just been way too unstable. We run a fleet of hundreds of RDS instances, and aside from this particular one and two others the reliability is exceptionally good. You are now on a brand new RDS based on Aurora and we don’t expect the problem to return.

The unexpected restarts got even worse in the last two weeks. This week it was discovered that it is caused by a bug with MariaDB itself, which is one of a few database engines for MySQL. Combining this with the fact that Amazon has not been able to provide us with a backtrace to be able to narrow down the query triggering the bug, we made the call to migrate everything away to a new DB instance based on Aurora and we are continuing in our discussions with Amazon to get to the bottom of the issue.

The $100 credit is 20% of your hosting cost. It’s not meant to be a one to one compensation for how these issues may have impacted your business, that’s a little intangible and difficult to quantify. We have a defined Service Level Agreement covering the right steps to take in these cases. It’s derived from the cost of your hosting plan and is meant to be a concession to show you we are taking the issue seriously and agreeing that your service level with Pagely was not up to par. As annoying as these unexpected restarts of the database server have been, it has been short-lived and things were not down for a very long time. During those events, yes, dynamic requests would have failed, but cached content continued to serve without any hiccups. Since the nature of the issue is not one severe outage, but multiple smaller outages, let’s say it’s happened ten times and lasted 1-2 minutes each time, it’s an aggregate of around 30 minutes total downtime experienced. I hope this rationale makes sense and you’re welcome to review our SLA if you like https://pagely.com/legal/service-level-agreement/ .

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