Forums / General / Firebright Hosting Down

Firebright Hosting Down

Author Message

Stuart DH

Sunday 20 February 2005 1:53:48 pm

As an eZ publish partner I was wondering if anyone else here is using Firebright at the moment and is having problems with their server being down.

My site has been down for nearly 48 hours with no mention of when it should be back online and they aren't returning emails. I've tried phoning but they're in the US and I'm in the UK and calls go into an answer machine queue with no idea when they'll pick up.

The up-to-the-minute reporting on their web site is giving reports that are more than half a day apart and so I'm completely in the dark.

If I'd known it would take this long to get sorted I'd have arranged for a new host and changed DNS by now. AFAIK, they haven't sent out a newsletter and there has generally been a serious lack of communication considering it's been an absolute disaster during the past two days.

If anone else knows more info I'd really appreciate hearing what's going on.

http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk

Simon Phillips

Sunday 20 February 2005 2:31:04 pm

I'm in exactly the same position. Fortunately for me, our site isn't live yet - but I was meant to be finishing it by working all weekend.

I've had no response either from Firebright; it's been over 12 hours since they said the RAID arrays were re-building. As far as I'm concerned, this is unacceptable - surely they could have migrated customer sites onto a backup VDS if they new it would take this long to rebuild the arrays.

If we were kept up-to-date with a planned return to service I'd be much happier - then I could at least use my time effectively while I'm waiting.

Simon

Stuart DH

Sunday 20 February 2005 3:31:15 pm

Hi Simon,

Sorry to hear that you also have a Firebright account.

As we enter the third day of blackout it certainly makes you wonder just how long it will take them to get this sorted. I've been checking virtually every 15 minutes to see if we're back online so that I can get back on with developing the site...a complete and utter waste of my weekend.

I hope that none of the other sites that are down are online shops because they've probably lost some serious revenue during the weekend.

 

http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk

Tom Tootell

Sunday 20 February 2005 4:45:55 pm

I'm another who has had an absolute nightmare of a weekend because of the problems with Firebright.

Worse than being an online shop, our site is a subscription one so tomorrow morning I fully expect my users to have jammed my inbox.

It has been problem after problem for us with Firebright but this will be the last one as this is completely out of order.

Did anybody else get even a warning that this would be happening?

Let's hope the blackout is sorted soon.

Simon Phillips

Sunday 20 February 2005 5:01:33 pm

The server's been down long enough for google to re-index their homepage - and cache the maintance page instead. ( http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=firebright ). Quite a long outage by most standards...

This just in from firebright.com's front page:

4:41p. Server has been restored. SW-Soft technical services are installing Viruozzo on the Starlight node and it should be restored as soon as their final work on the system is complete. Starlight should be restored momentarily.

We experienced some major problems with SW-Soft software re-installation that prevented a speedy restore, most specifically that the backup software provided by HSP to back up their software is incomplete and does not include important information needed to restore the accounts. FireBright had replaced the physical system by 3am Saturday morning. We're very discourage with SW-Soft, as this is the second time their software has let us down even on simple server restoration, and are evaluating our options going forward.

We deeply apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced.

Please note that none of our customers on Taclight, Limelight, Daylight, Whitelight, Brightlight, Darklight, Greenlight, Blacklight, Redlight, FireLight or any of our other production systems were affected. This outage was limited to a single server.

Sean Newton

Sunday 20 February 2005 7:37:27 pm

Let me introduce myself - my name's Sean Newton, and I'm Firebright's senior systems administrator. On a personal note, it's now Sunday evening and I've had about four hours' sleep since I woke up on Friday. Some of you have expressed outrage about the lack of updates - my only response to that is to assure you that all of our time went to repairing the machine.

Judging from the posts here, our recent outage has been a hardship to some of you, and we are sympathetic. Some of you have expressed interest in making other arrangements for ezpublish hosting, and we understand why you're concerned. However, right now your Ezpublish accounts are hosted on Starlight, which is a large virtual-environment server. We monitor it, we keep it running pretty well - but by its very nature, whenever it does go down, it takes a long time to recover. More on that later.

As for this weekend's incident, our expected scenario for the full restoration of that particular machine from backups was between four to six hours. Unfortunately, a number of links broke down along the way. For one thing, the hosting provider lied about having Redhat certified techs on site, so we had to send people to the data center in Friday night traffic. For another thing, I've got a really great screenshot of an enterprise-grade IP KVM displaying sync problems like a broken TV (which would've given me a shot at hands-on repair of Starlight). And on top of that, the backups made by the Virtuozzo system did not include the system configuration files needed to start the VE servers, which had to be re-generated by hand. This was an undocumented issue with Virtuozzo, which should have disclosed to us by our vendor. Rest assured, the files left out were not part of your VE, and you're not missing anything from this issue.

Enough of that. You're concerned about your site, not the machine hosting it. Regarding your site, the all-or-nothing nature of a VE environment makes it less than ideal for sites with an urgent need for high uptime. For these sites, Firebright has always recommended the use of dedicated or co-located equipment. Most of our serious ezpublish customers are already using dedicated servers. These servers offer higher reliability, complete control, and available service level agreements.

If you'd like to switch from shared hosting on Starlight into a dedicated ezpublish server, we'll give you free setup plus a free month to apologize for this weekend. While you could switch providers, if you're using a shared environment in your new provider, you're still at risk of the same problems Firebright had. On a dedicated server, your site is the only site hosted on it, and recovery rarely takes more than an hour. Our last dedicated server restoration took 25 minutes from bare metal.

For all customers who were affected by this outage, regardless of whether your site is of a business or personal nature, we're offering you free setup on a dedicated server, as well as your first month of hosting free. If you're not satisfied with it after a month, you can move back to shared hosting or cancel your account with no additional charge.

You can use the URL below to check it out, but you'll need to use the code 'eZ24' in the shopping cart to get the Starlight customer reimbursement package:

https://my.firebright.com/store/index.cgi/pid,122

Stuart DH

Monday 21 February 2005 1:17:11 am

Thanks Sean for you're recent explanation, it almost sounded like you were making an apology and whilst you never actually said it, I think I'm right in saying that you what you wanted to say is that you're 'Sorry!'. I guess we'll have to settle for you being sympathetic with our hardship.

Just a few questions about the quality of the Firebright service.

What prevented you from sending emails to your customers to say 'Look, we've got a major nightmare at Firebright and this total disaster will probably leave you in a complete blackout for at least a few hours/the rest of the day/24 hours/the entire weekend!'

Better yet, what prevented you from making a phone call to explain the above, or at least get some more people in to answer phones so that we didn't have to wait in an automated queue.

Why did you not reply to our emails to emergencysupport@firebright.com ?

What prevented you from making updates to the firebright.com front page that were more like the promised up-to-the-minute reports and less like the actual up-to-the-fourteen-hours-plus?

It sounds to me as though your biggest problems can be directly sourced to your hosting provider and Virtuozzo. I'll make the assumption that you already knew about the problems with Virtuozzo backups not including the configuration files, because obviously that would have been identified during risk analysis and when running your regular exercise scenarios in system failures? I assume that you do actually do this at Firebright?

I trust that you also identified your hosting provider's lack of Redhat certified techs, as this would also be an obvious 'pinch-point' that would have been realised from even the most rudimentary risk assessment.

So where does this leave us? Did you know about these problems already but simply chose to ignore them, or not have suitable procedures in place to remedy them. Or, did you not have a risk analysis system that could identify such critical weaknesses in your company? I'm still undecided as to which of the above scenarios is more scary, so I'm hoping that I've missed something and you can provide some alternatives.

I certainly find your remedy very interesting - we can move our $30/month VDS accounts to one of Firebright's $300 per month dedicated server accounts (setup and first month free). That's hilarious!

http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk

Gregory Mann

Monday 21 February 2005 7:06:03 am

Yes I too have been affected. I have a reseller account with about 10 domains, so they've obviously been affected also. However in the midst of this, right now the focus has to be:

1. Get back online
2. Arm us with some information to give to our customers

Whatever has or has not been done correctly up to this point, <b>at this moment in time</b>, doesn't matter. We'll deal with those issues (compensation, reperations, should've could've would'ves), when the time is right.

Right now, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, give us regular (30 or 60 minute) updates. Even if it's only to say there has been no change. Bad news is better than no news at all. This is becoming an integrity issue between me and my customers, so if I can at least tell them "as of 45 minutes ago, this was the status" thats a whole lot more credible than, "there hasn't been an update since yesterday."

And just as an FYI, Jonathon, I've prayed for you, that God give you wisdom and knowledge to come through this as quickly and efficiently as possible. If anybody else wants to jump on that bandwagon, I'm sure that it'll be appreciated!

Greg

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

Groucho Marx

Tom Tootell

Monday 21 February 2005 3:09:55 pm

Somebody cynical could say that this blackout was intentional so as to transfer us all on to dedicated servers. "You can have a free month but after that it will cost you 10 times as much!"

The whole reason that many users aren't on the dedicated servers is because we are small companies that simply can't afford a huge hike in prices. It seems as if firebright are saying that it is OUR fault for being foolish enough to believe that we could expect our site not to be pulled down for over 50 hours without warning or support!

It would be hilarious if it wasn't true, but I find it quite disgusting along with the fact that I still haven't seen the word "sorry" appear anywhere from Firebright.

I shall be moving from Firebright as soon as I can and advising other people to stay well away from them.

Sean Newton

Monday 21 February 2005 4:43:49 pm

Tom - no one's calling you foolish, but no matter where you go, if they're running a large virtual server environment, they're also at risk for what we went through.

Stuart + general -

I've been told they're developing new contact/communications procedures, but my "from the trenches" view this weekend was that about every 8 hours, we thought we were about 8 hours from resolution until we discovered a new problem in the chain. I imagine that in the future, Jonathan will have someone in charge of contact/response while the rest of us work on the network.

As for the emergencysupport@firebright.com address, that one doesn't go to me. If it DID, and I were to have been responding to emails from it (or, as suggested, pro-actively making phone calls every time we had a new ETA), we'd still be down today.

As for the RHCE's, most likely our provider has SOME RHCEs on staff, but none of them were on duty this weekend. This is an very common practice in data centers, btw. Anyone else who's worked with a few different data centers can probably back me up on this.

As for the remedy - you can talk to the tech support guys about compensation packages that don't involve migration if you want. Dedicated servers are the way to go if you absolutely can't take downtime, but no one's saying you HAVE to go there.

kracker (the)

Monday 21 February 2005 5:14:43 pm

I was wrong and you need to know it. Anyone who spends more than 3-12 months around Jonathan (Whatever his last name is this year) will realize that no one should let him in their life at any capacity, on any terms, at all.

Jonathan / FireBright is a hosting services that will never come out of the closet.... Jonathan / FireBright is a pariah in any community (in person, software communities, eZ publish, Drupal, etc). Jonathan will build up a person with compliments only so their insults will hurt all the more.

Sadly only the people who do trust him with their data, hosting or meet him in person for extended periods of time will begin to see how he manipulates people to _his_ advantage. without thought or pause to his affect on the victim...I mean customer.

Watch them try to put a new spin or excuse on the why, but you can't escape the nature of their presence on the eZ publish community, take a look at what they contribute.... Google in depth about FireBright, watch Jonathan post online simply to increase his name / business name's Search Rank Placement with pointless posts to old topics.

Sad part about these kinds of people is that it takes people who will stand up and go public with their experiences to oust these types of people for what they really are; from seeming to be upstanding regular people on the surface and warning others about the inherent dangers of these kinds of people in any situation.

See: Pariah in the community, Parasitism, Social Parasite, Predator, adnausium... In short, Social parasite is a derogatory term denoting a member detrimental to the rest of society by taking advantage of it. In some cases the term is related to specific notions.

My sincere apologies go out to anyone who has ever been a customer of FireBright or is considering having anything to do with FireBright. Talk to advanced users who have hosted with them, they will tell you about the `pages` of problems associated with using them, poor support, don't answerer or return phone calls, you can trust FireBright to take your money but that's about it.

//kracker
this isn't about me, i'm already dead
---------------------------------
Search, Lyrics, Korn, Fake

---------------------------------
My Mistaken Opinion ...

First off, let me start off by saying I proudly host with Firebright.com and will continue to do so.

I have over 4 different vds accounts with Firebright, all of them were on the affected starlight hardware node.

I do web development for a living, not a hobby, so when service is affected it affects me greatly. But I don't run to the first forum I find to tarnish the providers reputation every time I have a problem. In the end that doesn't solve your problems, instead it makes you look really bad. 

<i>The Outage</i>

This was not an intentional outage! You honestly belive that an enterprise eZ publish hosting firm, an eZ publish partner no less, would risk their reputation like that? If you belive that your only fooling yourself. 

Forum posts are forever, your only making yourselves look like jaded customers without sympathy for what was a really bad situation gone wrong. Usually people who make comments like your making don't really understand or respect just how intense and complicated it is running an enterprise hosting platform. 

<i>The Reply</i>

I interpret Sean's post as saying that if you need 99.999% uptime that is not encumbered by the requirements of all the other clients who host on the same hardware you can find this with hosting your applications / sites on dedicated hardware. He was not saying that if you were bothered by the outage that you should switch to dedicated hosting. He was offering a solution to customers who need a higher level of service and availability.

Every hosting provider in the market has hardware failures, they are a fact of life. It's what you do afterwards to recover and get back to work that makes the real difference. Firebright offers service unmatched in the market place with a lot of features that others charge a lot for ...

<i>The Response</i>

I guess unless you have spent 36 hours straight replacing, rebuilding and recovering an enterprise server you could quickly belive that there was a whole lot more to say than the firebright.com said during the outage. 

I'll agree with you, it would have been nice to have consistent 4 hours entries to the site that explained the status in greater detail, but I would disagree that updated status messages that can't really explain in detail enough to everyone would be worth it if they took away from the recovery of the outage.

I myself didn't send an email or call them, nothing. I knew it was outside my hands and in theirs. I knew that service would be restored as soon as physically possible and not a moment before regardless of how frustrating it was for me and my clients or how much I wanted to complain about any number of things that failed to meet my fancy.

Take a good long look from someone else's perspective besides your own? Respond objectively, be open minded about this being a breakdown for everyone who relied on starlight and that your not alone. Many of us were affected, including Firebright, who hosts their own site on the very server that the outage affected.

"Be Like Water" is a well-grounded, step-by-step approach to applying the warrior mind-set to life's daily challenges. 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0446690317/104-8560583-3247938?v=glance

Respectfully,
Graham Brookins 
Brookins Consulting
eZ publish Developer

Eyedea And Abilities > One Twenty

Member since: 2001.07.13 || http://ezpedia.se7enx.com/

Jack Rackham

Monday 21 February 2005 5:42:57 pm

I too have bad experience with an EZ publish host provider. The company called "nordichosting" was fist listed as an "Advanced solution partner" (whatever that means) in ez partners list http://ez.no/partner/partner_list . Fist "nordichosting" deleted my EZ publish directory because "it was some errors in the install"(they said), and as I result of this I lost 2 months work. Then they incorrectly upgraded EZ publish so my site became terribly slow. And then after 3 months they announced that they were give up hosting EZ "because of all the error in it".

So my advice is simple, because EZ requires root and SSH access and because a dedicated server is very expensive, the best solution for a small-medium site is to host EZ publish yourself.

Badger Mushroom

Tuesday 22 February 2005 9:53:37 pm

kracker,

Sorry for being off topic. I understand your websites are also on the same affected server. I was wondering if you can pay a visit to my site, crystaladdict.com. I don't understand why... but the site sometimes crawls to intolerable level. FireBright has been very helpful, but they said my site's not getting hit enough. They concluded the server is warming up when I request a page from the site, thus, the site requires some time to process.

Since you are on the same server, could you pls provide any tips on how to speed up the site a bit?

It's really difficult to find a decent ezpublish host in America.

Thanks much!

Andre Felipe Machado

Wednesday 23 February 2005 4:05:19 am

Hello,
I visited your site.
It seems that it is simply a cache rebuild side effect.
As far I know, from time to time EZ flushes the cache. The next time one visit the page, it is rebuild from scratch and stored in Ez cache. From this point the same page become fast.
Also, php accelerators optimizers and database load play important role.
Regards,
Andre Felipe

---
A Debian user never dies. Issues a last command:
shutdown -h now

http://www.techforce.com.br

Badger Mushroom

Wednesday 23 February 2005 4:23:37 am

I'm still trying to get FireBright to install Zend Optimizer or whatever to speed up the PHP code.

So, do you have any suggestions on how to deal with this issue?

Thanks again.

kracker (the)

Wednesday 23 February 2005 11:45:33 am

Man I'm a riot :D
What a laugh.

Ever notice how quick FireBright gave up on the ezpublishforums.com ... shows their commitment to what they start.

//kracker

Korn : Leave this Place...

I was wrong ...

Badger Mushroom & The Rest,

In the future please start a new thread and refrain from playing on someone else's green. I read ez.no way to much not to know when my name comes up in the content. 

Alternately you can catch my attention at the http://ezpublishforums/ forums or mailing lists (the email lists are great for off forums direct discussions).

This thread is dead. Please, respect it's passing.

In the future new threads with a unique thread name specific to the topic of discussion in the content body of the thread are much more affective and user friendly. 

Remember even though the thread reply subject defaults to the parent message's subject it by far does not need to stay the same to find the parent thread. In fact customizing it helps better make use of the entire forum message more effective using all the fields uniquely to convey the brief issue (name) in context to the contents of the message regarding the issue (body).

My reply to your can be found at : http://ezpublishforums.com/showthread.php?p=5#post5

Please move your discussion into a <b>new</b> more appropriate thread (reply to the above). Please do not continue to spam this thread, it's dead, let's just let it go, come on, you know it's ok, let it go. Don't reply to this thread, just don't.

respectfully,
//kracker

{$insert_quip_here} , then just I had to say something about how your name sound more made up than mine...

Member since: 2001.07.13 || http://ezpedia.se7enx.com/

Chris R

Monday 17 October 2005 6:02:41 am

Hello all- despite the obvious protestations of kracker I need to revive this thread.

I am trying to find a new CMS to use and as my name would indicate have absolutely no experience with them whatsoever but I am leaning towards eZ Publish.

I was doing a Google search on "eZ Publish host" and this thread came up second and as I had seen Firebright advertising as an exceptional host for eZ Publish, I wanted to know if anyone here has experienced any similar problems in the intervening months with Firebright.

Ironically, as I said before I had seen Firebright's site and actually sent them a pre-sales question partly in regards to not seeing an uptime guarantee several hours ago through thier "24/7" support mail and had not heard back from them so I was looking for other hosts specializing in eZ Publish when this thread came up.

As kracker himself said in his post: "Every hosting provider in the market has hardware failures, they are a fact of life. It's what you do afterwards to recover and get back to work that makes the real difference."

So with that in mind I was just wondering if anyone has experienced anything similar since this incident or if it was an isolated event.

I am in the USA and it does not seem like that many hosts specialize in eZ Publish.

I found a host called siteground.com which says they do, and they seem much larger and offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee and I cant see any guarantee whatsoever on Firebright's site, however- while they are cheaper overall (with shared hosting), thier VPS accounts are 3x that of Firebrights (from what I can see Firebright does not offer shared hosting for eZ Publish).

I mention this because I am curious to know if anyone has any opinions on whether VPS hosting is better for eZ Publish because of the demands this CMS puts on a server or if it does not matter either way.

Incidentally, I am not trying to "pile on" against Firebright- they seem to have a nicely designed site and are offering "eZ Online editor" free with signups which seems like a nice perk, however I worry about reliability issues in general and would rather know now if it will be a problem as judging by thier Alexa.com rating (which is not perfect) they are a fairly small company so I wonder if they can handle the demand this site will put on them as this will be a large membership community and I dont want to go through this twice so I was a little concerned even before I saw this thread.

Also- I know this is already a long post and I dont want to go "off topic" but it seems like a better idea to get a few general answers here than start a completely new thread which would just take up more space and this thread is in the "General" category anyway so...

Speaking of the "eZ Online editor" - what does that do exactly? is that like a "WYSIWYG" editor? I tried to look through the literature but I am seriously dumb with CMS systems and have never even used FrontPage etc. and dont want to learn now.

That is actually the main reason I like eZ Publish is that it produces search engine friendly URL's.

However, I dont know PHP at all either so will I be able to even edit anything right in the file manager without this tool? I only know actual HTML and do all my work right in the manager.

I dont like WYSIWYG as from an SEO perspective (which I DO know a lot about) they are bad so I want to use CSS but maybe I get WYSIWYG anyway with this CMSI am unclear about that.

Also, I realize this is a eZ Publish site and hope it's not bad form to ask - but I have read in many, many places that while everyone seems to agree ez publish is a great CMS- it is also a very difficult CMS to learn, and that is for people with some scripting experience- I am a total idiot with that kind of thing and dont really have the time or aptitude to invest in learning PHP so is this CMS too much for me?

One reason I am thinking of Firebright is that they have everything pre-installed as even installing something like this is way beyond me.

Like I said I am definitely leaning towards ez publish or I would not be interested in the firebright question, but just for comparison sake can anyone else possibly give me an idea of any other simple to utilize CMS' out there?

The 1 main requirement is the clean URL's which from what I can see, only Drupal and Sitellite have this feature besides ez publish and they both look as hard to learn and are not as nice looking.

The only other one around that has this feature I have found is Joomla/Mambo, but they do it with an ugly hack I have read and I want it built into the core.

Anyway, I seriously apologize for this really long post but I have been reading day and night for 2 weeks to find something so I really, really need some advice on this so any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks very much.

Tony Wood

Monday 17 October 2005 6:40:38 am

Hi Chris,

First, I would like to thank you for spending the time to write the message. It shows you care and that is a good thing.

>>Other CMS's
I think that you pick you CMS based on need. Some CMS environment are great at doing specific things. That is why Open Source is such a great thing. Just make sure that they XML it stores the information in is transferable.

>>SEO
I would love to learn more about your problems. We have had none in this area so would like to understand the issues.

>>Online Editor
This is a great little tool. It allows you to enter content as if you were using a Word Processor. To be honest we rarely ship a site without it.

Check out the demo here: http://ez.no/products/ez_publish_cms/demo or http://admindevel.ezpublish.no/

I am sorry things did not work out better for you.

Tony

Tony Wood : twitter.com/tonywood
Vision with Technology
Experts in eZ Publish consulting & development

Power to the Editor!

Free eZ Training : http://www.VisionWT.com/training
eZ Future Podcast : http://www.VisionWT.com/eZ-Future

Gabriel Ambuehl

Monday 17 October 2005 6:57:40 am

I'd say VPS hosting would help. ezpublish is quite ressource hungry and usually the ISPs cram fewer VPS on a machine than normal hosting customers. This makes sense, as VPS needs more RAM and other ressources and is thus somewhat self limiting.

As for ezpublish being hard, yes and no. For standard stuff, it's quite straight forward, but once you leave that, it gets rather hard. It is however quite a bit more flexible than most of the other CMS, surely much more so than Mambo.

If you don't feel you can install itself, it's likely you won't be happy with it after that. :(

Visit http://triligon.org

Chris R

Monday 17 October 2005 4:24:09 pm

Hi Tony, thanks for your reply-

I think I should reiterrate that I am beyond stupid when it comes to CMS' and programming etc... for example I dont even understand what this means: "Just make sure that they XML it stores the information in is transferable."

I have heard of XML for RSS feeds but dont understand really what it is. I mean I know what an RSS feed is but the underlying tech, I got no clue lol

">>SEO
I would love to learn more about your problems. We have had none in this area so would like to understand the issues."

I dont have a problem with SEO- I am actually an expert in this area- some things I am really moronic at- some things incredibly proficient- this is one I am great at. I dont have a "problem" with SEO- I was saying that because I am so good at it and understand it so well that this was the primary reason I was thinking about ez publisg as it produces clean url's with no query strings with weird code search engine spiders have trouble following like question marks ?

I was merely asking if anyone knew of any other CMS' out there that produced clean URL's other than Drupal, Sitellite or Mambo/Joomla.

">>Online Editor
This is a great little tool. It allows you to enter content as if you were using a Word Processor. To be honest we rarely ship a site without it."

LOL- again- to reiterrate- I dont even know how to use a word processor. Never used one. like I said I edit my sites directly in the file manager. I know- crazy huh? :-)

I guess I was asking since I dont really understand how CMS' work if i need the editor add on to actually edit anything if i dont know PHP- Would I be able to go into the file manager and just edit CSS or HTML?

I tried to check out that demo and it keeps freezing on me and I am on a cable modem with a fast computer which scares me a little about this CMS as I have read in several places it has quite a long latent lag time to load (5-6 seconds). Thats forever for me and I think most people on high speed access- if I come across a site that wont load in a second or two i close the window and never return to that site lol Thats one reason I was thinking about VPS as I was hoping it might make it load quicker.

"I am sorry things did not work out better for you."

Not sure what you mean by this- just to be clear I have had no problems with firebright i want to be clear about that- I was merely considering them as a host for this CMS and came across this thread so i though it prudent to ask people here who had a problem with them if it was a one time thing or typical. I actually just recieved a response from my pre-sales inquiry from them through thier "24/7" helpdesk - exactly 11 hours later.

Not comforting.

if you mean sorry for nearly having a aneurism trying to figure out even who to use thanks, i am about to crack lol. I am nearly to the point of breakdown before I even CHOOSE a CMS- much less configuring and operating it so I dont know. maybe I will just slap up a typical phpbb board but I want something I can build on- I dont want to have 10,000 people join and then 6 months later make them all resign up for something else so I feel paralyzed at this point.