You may recall that I recently had some trouble with a once reliable hosting company. I’ve moved away from them now (they were hosting other sites of mine, not this one), but they did get me thinking.

How much downtime should you put up with?

What if the host has been reliable for years?

Do you really want to go through the inconvenience?

Trust me, it is a major inconvenience to change hosting companies. DNS updates much faster than it used to; a matter of hours rather than a couple days as it once was, so you have less time to lose activity on your site if you have a forum or something, but there’s a lot to get done before you risk it.

In my case it took a long time to decide to leave my prior host. They had been reliable for a couple years. I liked the service. But when the server I was on started having major downtime due to server hardware issues that kept happening over and over, I had to give up.

I do believe in taking past performance into account. If I didn’t I would have left them with the first big downtime, which was several painful hours.

The decision must be based upon your own tolerances. All servers will go down at some point, but a good hosting company will know how to handle it. Most downtimes are a matter of minutes, and you won’t even notice.

A good hosting company will also have a way for you to check on what’s happening during a server outage without contacting support. Don’t expect them to contact you; I’ve found that to be quite rare indeed. But there should be a status page, blog page or forum where they will share what they know. Make sure you know how to get that information so you can get a quicker answer than you would by contacting support.

Even if you’ve just had a bad downtime, take the time to really research your options. I did, and that was what helped me to settle on Host Gator. Settle is perhaps the wrong word, since I’m really pleased with their service. They helped move my main site over, so I didn’t have to figure it all out myself. The little changes between servers can make things quite challenging, and they handled that for me.

I’ll admit that in some ways I’m sentimental for my old hosting company. There were good and I still think of them as a mostly good company. They just couldn’t handle the extreme issues that my server threw them (hardware, not software) quickly enough and when they had constant problems I had to make the tough decision. I’m still unhappy that they couldn’t handle the problems well, and I won’t go back, but there’s that sentimental bit from when I raved about their otherwise excellent service.