Recently I have spent a lot of time looking for a new web hosting company for my sites. Unhappy with the current set up for more than a few months, I finally decided to resolve the hosting issues I have experienced.
A bit of background…
I host 30 plus sites. They’re hosted by three different companies. Some sites do well, some don’t. Some are ideas awaiting development, some have been around for ages and cause me a little embarrassment, others are experiments and one or two are just downright failures. A few are sites I host for friends and clients.
Time to move on
During the past couple of years two of my sites have experienced persistent problems with excessive CPU usage. Every other month or so one or both of the sites got switched off because they used “too many server resources”. Both sites were hosted on shared hosting space, one at HostGator (where I have a reseller account) and one at LunarPages.
On top of that I also found I had a very poor experience with all the WordPress sites hosted with HostGator – the loading and processing time (for the site and the admin area) was painfully slow at times. After speaking with HostGator’s tech support many times I believe the problem was due more to my geographic location (the UK) and the number of hops the data had to make to reach me than their servers.
Rude awakening
One day, at 5am, a phone call from HostGator’s automated phone system woke me to tell me my site was using too much CPU and had been temporarily shut down while I resolved the issue. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I get a call at 5am I tend to get very worried about members of my family. I wasn’t happy, and told HostGator so.
That was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back and I decided it was time to move away from HostGator.
Now, with all that being said, and even though I have had a bit of a rough time with HostGator and LunarPages, I would still recommend them as hosting companies; they are just not right for me and the stage my business is now at. I need to spend time creating content and working on the front end of the sites, rather than fixing problems related to server restrictions and excessive CPU usage.
My time with LunarPages was generally excellent, it’s just the site outgrew the server and their VPS/dedicated server costs were too high, and as they were the only options available to me, I had to move.
If you are just starting out and would like to go with a well-known company, then either of these hosting companies will work for you.
Where are we know?
Being totally honest with you, I absolutely hate looking ’round for a new web hosting company. I can’t think of anything more tedious than comparing bandwidth, allocated memory, uptime and downtime. It is probably the one reason I stayed with HostGator for so long.
To cut a long story short I eventually found two companies that I liked the sound of and who had glowing testimonials and reviews on different web hosting review sites. I found testimonials that included URLs so I could test them out – remember I believe my problems with HostGator where due to my geographic location – and if they worked well, I checked the name servers were that of the company I was researching by performing a search at Domain Tools.
The first company I signed up with was Arvixe. Prior to this bout of research I had seen the name around before, but the company didn’t come across as anything special.
I came across a page at Host Search that contained a few good reviews of Arvixe. So I decided to take a look at their site to see what they had to offer.
This is what I was looking for:
- A host that can handle WordPress sites
- A server that quickly loads the pages of a WordPress site
- Affordable
- Good technical knowledge from the online support staff
- cPanel and Fantastico (don’t like Plesk)
- Based in the US
- A company that would move my sites from the old company to the new server
- Servers that were not overloaded
- Server reliability
- Ability to seamlessly upscale
Speed was most important factor. The sites had to load quickly. I would be happy to pay a little more each month as long as the sites worked well and I didn’t have to keep fixing and tweaking them.
I spoke to a couple of people at Arvixe using the online chat facility (I called twice) and asked a lot of questions about the criteria above. They answered my questions quickly and seemed to tick all the boxes. They offer a 60 day money back guarantee and 24 hour support (you don’t realise how important 24/7 support is until you don’t have it). I was happy, so I signed up.
I bought the reseller package as a replacement for HostGator and set about moving the sites across. I could have gone for the standard Personal Class ($4.00 per month) option as that allows you to host up to six sites, or I could have gone for unlimited sites on the Personal Class Pro package ($7.00 per month), but you only get one Control Panel. As I have clients and friends for whom I host sites, it was important to have separate Control Panels, so the best option for me was the Reseller package.
Moving the sites
To move the sites across I had to open a support ticket and supply the domain, username and password. Arvixe would handle the rest. I have never transferred a site from one host to another using a back up of cPanel before, so I was a little nervous. There was no need. Arvixe backed up everything (email addresses, cPanel configuration, WordPress files, plugins etc) and moved it over. All I had to do was change the nameservers of the domain to point to the new servers and wait for the change to propagate. The move was seamless.
I initially moved across five sites as a test. They were all transferred without problems and I immediately noticed a difference in speed. The download times were considerably faster than they had been at HostGator (and I could check them against each other as I had two installations of the same site).
I have now been with Arvixe for about three months. I have had no problems with server responses or downtime and I have only had to contact support once – I wanted to change the domain name associated with an existing package.
The second hosting company I have dealt with during the past few weeks is KnownHost. Now these guys are something special. The hosting they offer is a step up from shared hosting. I bought a VPS (Virtual Private Server) package to host my biggest sites and really to get a feel of how VPS hosting works.
KnownHost does everything Arvixe does, but they do it so much better (remember, they cost more too). Responses to my emailed questions were usually received within 10 minutes, they migrated all the sites I asked them to in just a few hours and the servers are extremely fast.
I have nothing but praise for KnownHost and would recommend them to anyone.
You might be asking yourself why I have the two hosting packages. Fair question. If I had come across KnownHost before Arvixe I would have gone with them, but as I didn’t, I haven’t. At the current time I am thinking of cancelling the Arvixe account (I pay this monthly) and moving everything to KnownHost, but the only reasons for doing so would be easy management and cost – and not the service provided.
To bring this post to a conclusion I would like to say that the decisions I have made about web hosts are purely down to my experiences, and if I were to give you an order of preference for shared hosting, it would be Arvixe in top spot, LunarPages in second place and HostGator in third. If you can afford it, and want a superb host, choose KnownHost (home of My Digital Internet).
