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.