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.

I just got back home from my son’s speech therapy. It’s a half hour of nothing to do for me, as parents have to wait outside.

Nothing, that is, but think.

While some days I talk with the other parents waiting for their kids, other times I pull out my notepad and start brainstorming. It’s a great way to come up with ideas.

Today, for example, my focus was on coming up with new blog article ideas. That’s when I decided to write this article. I also came up with 25 other ideas.

None of them are fully developed. Some will take research, while others will require mere minutes to write. Some will generate multiple articles.

All in all, that’s not a bad return for a half hour of time.

I’ve been having trouble with one of the hosting companies I use for my sites. It’s hard because this used to be my favorite company… low, low downtime, served my pages fast. But lately Site5 just hasn’t been delivering.

I don’t mean in small ways either. I’m talking 12+ hour downtimes. One ongoiong as I type, another a couple weeks ago, another one within the past 6 months. Other little downtimes that I didn’t notice at the time, but did hear about.
Livid might be a word to describe how I’m feeling. Same for climbing the walls.

I’ll admit it’s a tough situation for them. These have been hardware failure issues, rather than anything to do with the load on the server.

As you can imagine, enough is enough and I’m researching where to move the impacted sites. I loathe changing hosts, but sometimes that’s all you can do.

I went over to the Web Hosting Talk forum to see what people thought of various hosting companies. My feeling is that you get a much better feel for the quality of a web host from a forum like this because they’re not biased by affiliate pay rates.

Right now I’m thinking Host Gator. Their reviews are mostly good; any host is going to have some troubles, which is why I’ve been so patient with Site5. They offer plenty of features for the price.

I did consider going with a VPS, but I’m not quite ready to take that step yet. My husband feels it’s too expensive, although I consider it still cheap compared to what an outside the home business would run.  But of course that really isn’t the poin.

Changing servers is always a big deal. It’s hard to avoid all the potential problems. Everything has to be updated so that you don’t have compatibility issues. When I moved from my previous webhost to Site5, they had to help me change my mySQL databases to the version they were using, as the previous host had been using a different version. Made things much rougher in the changeover than I had expected.

And that’s why I’ve been so patient and am still not eager to do it again. I lost so much work time to the changeover before. But maybe things will go better this time. I like to hope so.