It was a relatively painless process transferring my hosting this week. Yes, I have finally made the move and am now contemplating whether to import my older articles here. Should I?
Why did I switch after having been with my previous hosting company since 2006? Where’s your loyalty, pigduck?! Well, I had incurred major downtime last year and it was frustrating. To appease us, they gave us 3 months extra for every time it was down. So I had 6 months free hosting!
Some of you may be thinking, well it’s just twice but the truth is, it was really long outage! So since then, I’d been searching and there are just so many companies out there. I was comparing plans and features, weighing pros and cons and decided finally, to go with Bluehost.
To be honest, all hosting companies essentially offer the same thing. I was asked why I didn’t want to host locally, like not with the same hosting company but with another since I can just call up support or what.
I did look around but felt some of the local hosting companies were a bit exorbitantly priced. And when I spoke to them, it would be like going through what I had with my previous hosting company – language barriers and just lousy service even if they were quick to respond. So rather than go through that all over again, I moved my website out of my country.
‘Support’ is a big thing, especially when you are on shared hosting and Bluehost live chat seems pretty reliable and I feel like I was talking to someone real at least.
Plus, I thought about it and my audience is not really local. It really matters who your audience is, by the way. After transferring my domain and hosting, I have seen a 100% spike in visitors.
However, what really sold me to Bluehost was Simple Scripts. I had been using Fantastico Deluxe for some time, I even tried installing Wordpress all on my own but I liked Simple Scripts ‘cos it had stuff that I wanted – SimplePie, Wordpress, ZenPhoto and shopping carts and the best part about Simple Scripts is that it provides the latest versions almost instantly. Like when I had just signed up to Bluehost, Wordpress just released Wordpress 2.8 and when I checked in Simple Scripts, it was already updated to version 2.8. Not bad, right?
Sure, I had read about Bluehost suspending accounts due to server overload or whatever (technical stuff go over my head) but I don’t think I’ll have THAT many visitors. Who knows… But Bluehost is recommended by Wordpress.org and not only that they host over 400,000+ domains so that must say something about their reliability as a company.
And so far, I’ve been impressed. Re-directing nameservers was easy enough, I went to my domain registries to point my domains to bluehost (I have 3 domains – 2 .com(s) and 1 .my [which is a hassle! never ever get one unless you host it locally]) and the best part was that there was hardly any downtime during the propagation process.
I learned one thing during this whole process – before you do the redirection, remember to upload the files, folders and the databases in your new hosting so that when the domains point to your new hosting server, you will not suffer downtime and it will look like you never transferred hosts. As visitors to your site, they want a smooth experience.
Installing Wordpress 2.8 was really easy with Simple Scripts. Configuring Wordpress was also easy, setting up permalinks for example. With my previous company, I had to manually change the permissions so that Wordpress could edit the .htaccess.
Anyway, so far I’ve been happy with my move. A satisfied customer.
Successful Host Transfer
It was a relatively painless process transferring my hosting this week. Yes, I have finally made the move and am now contemplating whether to import my older articles here. Should I?
Why did I switch after having been with my previous hosting company since 2006? Where’s your loyalty, pigduck?! Well, I had incurred major downtime last year and it was frustrating. To appease us, they gave us 3 months extra for every time it was down. So I had 6 months free hosting!
Some of you may be thinking, well it’s just twice but the truth is, it was really long outage! So since then, I’d been searching and there are just so many companies out there. I was comparing plans and features, weighing pros and cons and decided finally, to go with Bluehost.
To be honest, all hosting companies essentially offer the same thing. I was asked why I didn’t want to host locally, like not with the same hosting company but with another since I can just call up support or what.
I did look around but felt some of the local hosting companies were a bit exorbitantly priced. And when I spoke to them, it would be like going through what I had with my previous hosting company – language barriers and just lousy service even if they were quick to respond. So rather than go through that all over again, I moved my website out of my country.
‘Support’ is a big thing, especially when you are on shared hosting and Bluehost live chat seems pretty reliable and I feel like I was talking to someone real at least.
Plus, I thought about it and my audience is not really local. It really matters who your audience is, by the way. After transferring my domain and hosting, I have seen a 100% spike in visitors.
However, what really sold me to Bluehost was Simple Scripts. I had been using Fantastico Deluxe for some time, I even tried installing Wordpress all on my own but I liked Simple Scripts ‘cos it had stuff that I wanted – SimplePie, Wordpress, ZenPhoto and shopping carts and the best part about Simple Scripts is that it provides the latest versions almost instantly. Like when I had just signed up to Bluehost, Wordpress just released Wordpress 2.8 and when I checked in Simple Scripts, it was already updated to version 2.8. Not bad, right?
Sure, I had read about Bluehost suspending accounts due to server overload or whatever (technical stuff go over my head) but I don’t think I’ll have THAT many visitors.
Who knows… But Bluehost is recommended by Wordpress.org and not only that they host over 400,000+ domains so that must say something about their reliability as a company.
And so far, I’ve been impressed. Re-directing nameservers was easy enough, I went to my domain registries to point my domains to bluehost (I have 3 domains – 2 .com(s) and 1 .my [which is a hassle! never ever get one unless you host it locally]) and the best part was that there was hardly any downtime during the propagation process.
I learned one thing during this whole process – before you do the redirection, remember to upload the files, folders and the databases in your new hosting so that when the domains point to your new hosting server, you will not suffer downtime and it will look like you never transferred hosts. As visitors to your site, they want a smooth experience.
Installing Wordpress 2.8 was really easy with Simple Scripts. Configuring Wordpress was also easy, setting up permalinks for example. With my previous company, I had to manually change the permissions so that Wordpress could edit the .htaccess.
Anyway, so far I’ve been happy with my move. A satisfied customer.