WebGrid has now closed indefinitely

I'm sorry to say, after 9 years of selflessly serving the freeware community, my good friend Bob, has decided to close down WebGrid on an indefinate basis.

Part of the reason for this is due to FastHosts being a pain in the rear and deciding the site was using "too many resources" (interesting considering it worked perfectly for over 2 years without their having an issue). First they moved the site to a "probation server" and gave Bob 7 days to get it sorted out - we worked on it and tweaked it as much as we could. Second, they advised (partial quote);

The developer of the site could set it up on their own Windows PC or server, then use FileMon (a free download from Microsoft) to monitor the activity on the database.

Alternatively they could migrate the database to mySQL or MSSQL, which would almost certainly resolve the performance issue immediately.

Regards,

Russell Workman

I actually did check the site on my own machine, and a much much lower spec machine than their server, and it NEVER CAUSED A RESOURCE ISSUE!. By far the funniest however, is their mentioning migrating the database to MySQL or MSSQL. Why is this funny? MySQL is after all, a free database right? WRONG!. FastHosts actually charge £70+ PER YEAR for MySQL, and SEVERAL HUNDRED PER YEAR for MSSQL.

Finally, when we'd made the tweaks, we received a note from Chris Davis, advising us (partial quote);

We are not confident that the problem has been resolved and believe that your site would still present a threat to the performance of the shared platform were it to be moved back. We have therefore suspended all services to the website in question.

In order to regain access to the site you will need to contact us explaining the steps that you will take to address the problem. On receipt of this communication we will be able to re-enable access to the site to allow you to resolve the problem. Should you require us to remove any unacceptable data and related services in order to resolve this problem we will require your explicit authorisation to do so. Once we are confident that the problem has been resolved we will move your website back to the shared hosting environment. Any further performance issues caused by your website will result in the site being permanently suspended and so we strongly advise that, in future, you actively monitor the resources used by the domains that
you host with us.

If the problem has not been resolved within the next 7 days your site will be permanently suspended.

I am personally annoyed by FastHosts because of this issue, not just because they decided, after not being a problem for 2 YEARS, that it was automagically causing an issue, but because Bob has ran a great website for several years, at his own expense, and I doubt I am going to be alone in being sorry to see WebGrid go.