The RDBlog

Moving web hosts is a big risk. One never knows for sure if it is for the best of perhaps worse. The jury is still out on my recent move. The signs so far say that it wasn’t a move in the wrong direction.

The previous host was a good decision at the time of moving to them. But after a few months, I was noticing intermittent loss of service on a far too regular basis. I would ping the route and get timeouts, so it seemed to be a routing issue. The path would return in about an hour. I was disturbed but not enough to consider moving.

A friend and fellow webmaster is using the same hosting service. He received noticed a month ago that he would be moved to a new (and “better”) server. This was done without issues. Whether the new server is “better” is subjective interpretation.

But it was an indicator to me that the host is either really good for updating to new hardware or, having issues with overloaded old hardware.

Then my server went down. I thought at first it was the usual temporary outage. After a couple of hours, I submitted a report. Hours longer I got a reply they are aware and working on the issue. They supplied an “information” link with no estimated repair time. It remained up for over 30 hours with no change in the “no information.”

With this host everything is on the one drive. Main files, Localhost MySQL, all Email. So, everything was gone. It was a total drive failure. After 30+ hours the site was back up running on very poor performance “temporary” system. Whatever that was.

Poor and weak communication and total outage for over 30 hours was all I needed to decide to make a move. They may be back and better than ever, but I did not stick around to find out.

The new host is also a big gamble. A totally new experience. Two big immediate gains are fantastic server response times and a much lower service cost. The real test is will this continue past the one year experience of the last host?