50 I’ve changed hosting

If you’re reading this, it means you’re accessing this website using the new hosting package I’ve purchased today.

The entire adventure only took about three hours, including ordering and paying for the package, receiving account access, setting up subdomains and email accounts plus various other options, and copying the website files and databases.

Granted, I don’t use the hosting servers for IMAP, I download all the mail to my home computer, otherwise it would have been more complicated.

The name of the new company is Lunarpages and chances are you’ve heard of them before, since they seem to be high in the top 10 on most hosting review sites I’ve seen.

It’s been a week now and everything works as smooth as butter. They offer a huge amount of features and the loading speed of the pages has visibly increased. They actually have a working support system (tickets and everything) and a community forum. With people alive on it. I can’t get over it (read on to see why).

At the same time, allow me to offer a kick in the behind to my former host, Online.net, as the old saying goes (”any kick in the arse means a step forward”). I didn’t mind the smaller set of features, smaller disk space, MySQL-only database or limited number of accounts or subdomains. They were perfect for my needs. I did mind, however, the random 500 Server Error’s, slow loading times or completely non-existent support. They never messed up my mail, though, bless their hearts (although they did get blacklisted as spammers a couple of times and made me unable to send stuff through their webmail.) Perhaps they’re more careful with the buyers of more expensive hosting plans, I wouldn’t know.

I’m paying about three times more for the new host, but guess what, I feel it’s worth it. Who would’ve thought that better service would make people gladly pay more money.

The best part is that the entire move is virtually risk free. The new host offers a 30-day money back guarantee, and I still have a couple of months left with my old host. My domain name registrar is separate from either hosting company, so it’s a simple matter of going and changing the DNS servers to point at whoever I currently favor. Should the new host let me down, I’ll be back to the old one in a few hours.

This is a cool trick which is worth remembering: never put your eggs in the same basket. Choose a trustworthy and reliable registrar, and make it different from the hosting company. This way you’ll less likely to get screwed.