The Solution: Changing Hosting Companies

In my last post, The Problem: My Hosting Company Sucks , I wrote about what led me to make the decision (not an easy decision, by the way) to move my sites to a different hosting company.

In the end, the risk was changing hosting companies with “four domains, hundreds of articles, and doing it seamlessly so there is no impact to users” compared to staying where I was. I chose to move.

How to make the choice?

I already had an account with MidPhase hosting based upon an affiliate recommendation from another blog. But, I could never figure out how to get the blog I wanted moved and updated (ironically, it was this blog…); there was little on line help and less when talking to support there.

I have managed my domains since their inception with Network Solutions, but they don’t specifically market to hosting blogs. However, their online and live support is more than terrific; they just didn’t really fit my need for having WordPress software hosted on a site.

And, just in case you may think I am a tech whiz, I’ve backed up my databases — but I don’t know what to do with them once I’ve backed them up. I like writing and working with readers. Not being wonderful with the technology for the sake of technology.

The revelation for me not wanting to do much of my own stuff was when I considered upgrading the software in Yahoo!’s hosting from version 2.0.2 to the current 2.2.1. Going to the WordPress.org website and looking at the instructions was bad enough; trying to implement them was worse.

So my criteria for hosting became much more straightforward since I learn by doing:

Good self-help. If I’m going to have to do something by myself (self-service nation), then what I read in self-help needs to make sense to me.

Forum Support. Lots of companies have forums, of course. My differentiator was how active the forums were in interacting. I figured with more interaction there was more likely to be more help at my level.

Good live support. Where I had accounts, I tried each channel of support (e.g., e-mail, web chat, or live support) and looked at the content and speed of responses. It was enlightening. Where I didn’t have an account, I went straight to the sales channels and did the same thing. The entire purpose here was to evaluate whether or not the company support would meet my level of need for the blogs.

One click install of WordPress. This is often touted in the market; this is really the hosting company offering up Fantastico, a scripting service that does the one click installation. Once you find that in the menu, Fantastico will install your blog after answering a few (long term impact) questions such as your blog address.

One click upgrades to WordPress. Once a blog has been created with Fantastico, you can then upgrade your blog to the latest release using Fantastico for the upgrade. This is no small deal in that you will need to upgrade your software 2-4 times a year in this type of environment. Having the “one-click” ability means that you don’t have to follow the obscure technology directions to upgrade your blog from WordPress.

That was the hosting company.

Moving the Content

Deciding on how to move the blog content was really daunting to me. I had moved a blog from Squarespace (a great hosting company) and to get the content moved ended up being a one post at a time proposition, including redoing all of the permalinks to the site.

Outside of taking a lot of time to move the content, changing the permalink structure essentially blew up all my Google-love in the search engine business.

So moving a blog to a different company is serious business. But, I was happy with how my blogs were set up. Happy with the theme. Happy with the structure of the blogs. Happy with the plugins I was using. I just wanted them to move.

You would think that there would be companies that would move your site for you in trade for dollars. And there are. In my research for hosting companies, I found a link to a company that offers to move your site for you with little or no downtime. I was quickly reading the offer and decided to try the service with one of my four blogs to see how it would work.

Worked really well. The most important thing for me was that it saved me a ton of time as I traded time for dollars to a company that already does this work, has the tools, and has the technical infrastructure knowledge I don’t have to set up the blog. I then continued and moved and upgraded my other three blogs.

I’ve purposely not revealed the names of the companies because I wanted this to focus on the criteria I used to move to a new hosting company and how I moved the blogs. But, I’ve not been happy with a couple companies and have named them. So at the end of this long post, I thought it would be smart to name the two companies I ended up with because these guys have the right idea and execute it well.

The winning companies for my business:

• Hosting: Bluehost.com
• Site Move: EZSiteMove.com

NOTE:

By the way, this article is part of the Shared Answers group writing project. The project is where two separate posts are written — one about a problem and the next one about the solution to the problem (this article).

The Shared Answers group writing project is sponsored by Writing Thoughts and Grow Your Writing Business. Laura and Yvonne did some great thinking around the format. The format enables one to write on any problem and solution; I wanted to write about something on the topic for this blog — technology for writers — and this format fits very well.

The project is open until August 15th, so add your posts to the project!

Scot