A change of host

I’ve decided to change my hosting company.

I am prepared for a lot of pain and suffering, but so far it’s going rather smoothly. This wasn’t some well thought out decision, but rather a fit of activity after becoming frustrated with the averageness of GoDaddy, my current host.

Finding a decent host is a real chore, and I came to this conclusion pretty soon the first time round. The internet is flooded with copy-cat hosting companies who are mostly resellers that buy bandwidth from real companies. Even their websites all look the same, with identical prices, identical features, and identical hidden setup fees. This makes me both weary and wary.

This is the internet so you’d think it would be easy to find a decent website with reviews of the companies. But no. Most of the companies have tied Google up in loops with their link farms. A search for ‘web host review‘ returns an immense number of fake review sites, each ranking the same hosting companies. It’s quite a sickening misuse of the internet. I shall refer to this collective as The Many.

I initially went with GoDaddy for a few reasons. The main was that I’d already used them to buy a domain name. Another company I was attempting to deal with were demanding I fax them my passport. I don’t think so. GoDaddy are big enough to be believable, didn’t want my blood as proof of existence, and already knew who I was. Great.

I should state that I’ve had no real problems with GoDaddy. Their uptime has been great, and their customer support has been fairly responsive, but there are a couple of reasons I got frustrated:

  • You can’t host more than one website. Well, you can, but only using horrible wobbly htaccess hacks
  • They use custom administration software that is slow, confusing, and downright obtuse
  • You have to pay extra to get the server logs
  • You have to put up with all the super-slick marketing

So I went host-hunting again. Somehow I stumbled across webhostingforum.com, which seems to be a real website that is not part of The Many. After a bit of digging I decided upon a company called Simpli Hosting. They’re a small Californian company that seem fresh and independent, and with a noticeable lack of trickery. The price was reasonable, they did everything I wanted, and the owner of the company responded personally to a question I asked. In fact, the owner runs a WordPress blog herself, which appears to be updated regularly with real-life happenings, and not just the giant advertising pitch that is Bob Parsons (owner of GoDaddy).

All this to say that I shall be transferring this blog over to the new host. There have been no problems so far, and hopefully the move should be transparent (although some comments may disappear and reappear at a different time).

Here’s hoping for good things from Simpli.

9 comments

  1. I currently do web hosting using a company called Micfo, which I resell. I would be happy to host your site for free if you haven’t gotten to far along with things.

    Spiff, Spaceman Spiff

  2. Hi,

    I so understand you!

    As a web designer I had some websites to host, and just like in your case, I couldn’t do it in one go.

    I was doing the exact same thing over a year now, looking through the amazing mess that is the web hosting business and I ended up actually buying web space in bulk from good hosting companies.

    Ironically, I had so many people, mostly professionals I have contact with, asking for hosting that I decided to setup a small hosting business… so there you go, I am now one more in those “Many”.
    I guess the only difference is I, or better put, “we” the users of the service I arrange, do not look into having profits but to reduce prices for everyone hosted in the system.

    Good luck with your new hosting!

    take care,

    paulo

  3. Actually, that’s a pretty good idea – a co-operative webhost. The trouble is always finding something like this, as the primary information source is too busy being confused by the many more aggressive hosts. I guess these things are more word-of-mouth. I hope more of these non-borg hosts appear.

    Simpli are doing good so far. The copy went smoothly, I find it a lot faster, and the administration is so much easier.

    Thanks.

  4. Thanks for that. I never thought of looking on WordPress – too wrapped up with Google! There’s a interesting selection of hosts there, although one or two that I avoided before because of the pushy marketing. It’d be interesting to see how they all compare.

  5. Hostroute (.ca, .co.uk, .com) has been okay. Good annual price for multiple sites. Look for the reseller accounts.

    What’s good? Speed of the servers. Built-in C-Panel. Reliability.

    What’s bad? Lousy support team, terrible help ticket system, total unwillingness to customise anything even for money, no telephone support.

    But it works and comes with good logs and most things you need, built-in.

  6. I did quite a bit of research before choosing TextDrive. TxD is superb! I know the term “user-centred” gets beaten to death, but it truly applies to these folks. Highly recommended.

  7. First of all, thanks for the wonderful theme work. I’ll be studying these when school ends later this week. I have tried and tried to find decent hosting reviews, and now I understand why it’s so difficult. This is a misrepresentation, if not fraud in some form.

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