Web Hosting

I find web hosting a strange beast sometimes.

To have a website you need to pay someone to host that for you, the trick is finding out who to host said website/s with.

There is a huge amount of companies out there, and I mean a really huge amount out there that can provide this service for you.

Where I started

I started out using a Canadian web host way back in the day, it all worked quite well and then they put their prices up, and I’m sure their service is worth every cent, it’s just I couldn’t afford the ongoing costs involved.

I moved my sites

I then moved all my sites to a local hosting provider which I found via asking around on Twitter.  I have been with them ever since.  All my sites are local websites and it made sense to me to have them hosted locally, I also like supporting local businesses, but I think it might be time for a change.

Why the change?

I think it’s just time to see what else is out there, there are a lot of providers now having specific set ups for wordpress sites which is a step above just shared hosting.

I also have the occasional problem about once a year, something either crawls to a slow speed, or I get a error 500 server type error.  And while it probably is something at my end, I don’t change things that often so I am never really sure.

Now I have to say the customer service is excellent and I like dealing with the people I deal with.  It’s just that the occasional time I want to show someone I’ve just met, or talked to one of my sites, it seems to just not be working.  And the rest of the time it seems fine.

Also for me and I’m not sure if this happens to other people, but the time my websites seem to crash or not appear is when I am no where near a computer and only have a patchy cellphone connection and am busy with something I can’t leave.

I also need to reduce the chances of that happening if possible, as the sites grow and more people visit them I need to make sure they are ultra reliable.  Especially during peak times like giant pumpkin growing season.

The other thing that sort of bugs me is the security error message I get when logging into some of the back end stuff, I’m told it’s all fine not to worry about it, but after so long I thought this would have been fixed up.

What other options are out there?

There are a lot, here in NZ and around the world.  And it boggles my mind.

For every good review there seems to be a bad review, but as one website put it, how many people out there actually write good reviews freely.  Like most things in life, all the bad stuff is reported first and loudly.

Also a lot of smaller hosts are probably just buying their hosting from a bigger company and reselling the product, so why not just go with the original provider.

I’ve found one that looks good, has some good features and seems to have a pretty high review rate across all the sites I could find.  Although I do need to keep in mind a lot of people do the whole affiliate thing and if you go through a site then they will get a commission.  Also if you find yourself on a review site that has hosts reviewed all together the top rated ones might actually own the review website.

I need to sort out my money, because if you pay yearly then the price drops quite a bit, and the first month is pretty cheap as a trial to see if you like it or not.

So once I have money sorted, it will be time to migrate the sites over, including this one and see how it all goes.

I’ll keep this updated if there are any issues or things to look out for.