Switching Website Hosts

I’ve been with HostGator (henceforth known as HG) since April of 2008. There were three main reasons for my signing up with them:

1. They had a special sign-up deal of only 1 penny for the first month.
2. I needed a reseller hosting account.
3. I didn’t do nearly enough research.

In all fairness, they were fine for the first year or so. I might even give them a year and a half of good service. I even suggested them to lots of people.

Within the last few months, things have gotten bad. Day after day of down-time. I spent hours of time in support chat being told that their admins were “aware of the situation” and they were “doing eveything they could get the situation fixed.”

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks doing research. Lots of it. I narrowed my results down to RackSpace and Media Temple.

The issue that I ran into with RackSpace is that they are geared toward larger companies more than they are the “little guy” and, as a result, didn’t really fit into my hosting budget.

I finally took the plunge and bought the basic hosting package (Grid-Service) tonight. I moved a site over from HG and the part of the process that took the longest was actually downloading the files from HG and uploading them to Media Temple. Just as a reference, I’ve had my Media Temple account for 2 hours and I’ve already got this blog running on it. Not too bad

I also got my email setup on Google Apps just to simplify my life.

The interface on Media Temple took me all of 5 minutes to navigate through and get figured out. I’ll be posting more updates to this as I get everything migrated over.

Please feel free to post questions or comments below!