Website Hosting Switch
Well, following up on my last post, we have decided to get a dedicated virtual server for our new hosting account (the provider will remain nameless). Sometime soon we will be making the hosting switch here. In the meantime, I thought I would post about why we went with who we went with.
To start with, they are a very respected name in professional web hosting. Beyond the brand name, though, they offer redundancy in their systems so that we won't go down if there is a problem with a hard disk. I was pretty impressed with their data center, and the fact that they seem to have all the angles locked down. One thing that impressed me was the fact that our new host does not deal with offering "uptime guarantees" or service level contracts. At first that worried me, but when I asked them why they didn't offer some sort of "99.9%" uptime guarantee, they responded that it has never been an issue. I like that attitude. Our current host boasts on their website that "most of our server had 100% uptime last year", which is not only deceiving but (in my experience) blatantly untrue.
So besides being impressed with their attitude towards that, I am also going to sing praises about their customer support. Since initiating the account, I have been charged with configuring the server for use. Since we are moving up to a dedicated virtual server, I have to ensure that PHP is updated, MySQL is the right version, we have the proper decoders on the server, and that everything else is good. On a side note, it's really nice having access to the PHP config files, so that I can make changes myself rather than waiting for the hosting company to make them (or tell me they can't do it). In the process of configuring the server, I have had some questions. So far I have not waited more than 8 hours for a response to support tickets submitted online, and have not had to wait for more than 3 minutes getting someone on the phone in person. This is a HUGE improvement over our current host. In addition, not only is customer support responsive (and toll-free), but they are knowledgeable and very kind.
That's all the sunshine out of me about that. I know there are many great hosting companies out there, but I sure wish that it was easier to determine which ones are legitimate and which ones just have a lot of bogus claims on their websites.
