TextDrive User Reviews

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Posted on Jan 28, 2006 by Molly

I drew the short straw when I bought into Textdrive and wound up on one of their less reliable servers. I asked for my account to be moved to a better server, and I was refused. They say they are working on it, and I believe them. But downtime has been significant. There have been promises to improve service, they say it will be better once they get this in place, or that in place. But after nearly a year with them, the promises have proven to be unrealistic to the point that I can't believe them anymore. And it's very frustrating. The server continues to crash for an hour or three at a time. No telling what that amounts to in lost business.

Posted on Jan 26, 2006 by atextdriveuser

I've been with TextDrive for a year. They've got great features, especially for people who know what they're doing. (They're software is generally cutting-edge, including, for example, php5-fastcgi and lighttpd; security, as far as I can tell, is excellent.) Likewise, their forums are a good place to get answers from many knowledgable users -- about WordPress, Textpattern, programming in general, and much else.

However, some of their servers (including the one my site is on) have experienced a fair amount of downtime (usually from half an hour to several hours at a time; recently, several times a week; some months, much better), apparently on account of buggy user software (which crashes) or for other reasons (generally explained in geek-speak).

So, if you mostly know what you're doing and want plenty of features, lots of know-how (among staff and other users), and a fair degree of freedom (on the technical side of things), TextDrive may be just what you're looking for.

If you don't need all of that, or don't want to be treated on the forums like a tech expert (or wannabe-expert), or if you don't want to take a risk on reliability (some users have had it quite good, others, like myself, have had to put up with frequent downtime), then consider looking elsewhere.

Most TxD users are very enthusiastic about their host (IMO, overly so); if you search the forum (forum.textdrive.com) hard enough, though, you'll find people with varying degrees of satisfaction -- especially after they stop drooling over the features. Staff, in my experience, is almost-always knowledgable; usually helpful; often friendly.