Changing The Hosting Provider For My Blog
I’ve been out of pocket on my blog for nearly a week now, and I apologize. It’s just been one of those weeks… Part of the reason I have been away, besides a killer workload, is because I have been migrating my websites and blogs to a new hosting provider.
I have been struggling with the decision to change my domain hosting provider for months. The reason it’s been such a huge burden on my mind is because I’ve been hosting my websites with these folks since 2001. I feel a little guilty leaving them because I have a good rapport with the head dude at Worldwide Mart.
I can’t complain about the quality of Worldwide Mart’s hosting service. My sites have never been down for more than 30 minutes at a time (since 2001) and I can count the number of times my sites were down on one hand.
Why did I change my hosting provider?
- Poor Customer Service - The main reason I changed my hosting provider is because their customer service has steadily declined over the last six months or so. By “steadily declined”, I mean that it required more and more of my time to get in touch with someone when I wanted to make a change to my account or had questions about my bill. I understand people are busy, but my phone messages and e-mails went unanswered for months and I only have so much patience.
- Cost - I have known for years that I could have gotten a better deal on hosting from another company. Worldwide Mart’s hosting rates are nearly double those of competing providers, but loyality played a big role in my decision to stay with them for as long as I did. Personally, I don’t mind paying someone a little extra if I feel like they really care about me and provide excellent service, but once their service started to suffer, I could no longer justify the additional expense. The only reservations I’ve had about the cost of my hosting is that they charged me a $1 fee for each parked domain and charged extra for better spam filtering software.
- Poor Support for Multiple Domains - As I mentioned before, I have several domains and hosting accounts. Some of the hosting accounts are personal, some are my commercial sites, and others are for my work or friends’ projects. In order to have all the sites I control under a single account, I had to buy a reseller account for my primary domain, at a higher rate. Every time I wanted to start a new website or blog, I would have to essentially resell myself a domain account.
Who is my new hosting provider?
I elected to go with Site5.com to host my websites going forward. I chose Site5 because their True MultiSite package is exactly what I’ve been looking for and Roberta Ferguson personally recommended them to me. She’s been using Site5 for a while and has been very pleased with their service and support.
This is why I chose Site5 instead of another company:
- Awesome Support for Multiple Domains - The True MultiSite plan allows you to create and remove hosting accounts instantly. I went with the MultiSite Dynamite, which allows you to have up to 6 full hosting accounts at no extra charge. They also allow you to park an unlimited number of domains on these accounts at no extra charge.
- Extreme Amounts of Disk Space and Bandwidth - The MultiSite Dynamite package allows you to use up to 15 GB of disk space and 1 TB (yes, one Terabyte) of bandwidth each month. My previous host only allowed 5 GB of bandwidth each month, so I was paying $10 extra for each 1 GB I went over the limit.
- Awesome Limited Time Discount - They have a Tell All Your Friends special running right now where you can get hosting for just $99 per year for the MultiSite Dynamite package. If you sign-up for two years, you can save even more.
- Site5 has an Affiliate Program - As you know, it costs money to host your own blog. If I can make a little money to offset the cost of my hosting with an affiliate account, I’m going to. I don’t blog to get rich, but it would be nice if it could pay for itself.
I have already moved this blog and my new blogger blog to Site5. The process of moving my blogs wasn’t nearly as troublesome as I expected.
If you are looking for a new hosting provider, I highly recommend you check out Site5.com. I wouldn’t recommend them if I wasn’t using their services myself.
Ahhhhh, I’m allergic!! Ahhh!!! LOL
Oh wait, I told you about ‘em….scratch that.
LOL!
I suppose I could have really been a friend and asked you to sign-up for Site5’s affiliate program and used your affiliate link when I bought my hosting. Sorry about that. It didn’t occur to me until after.
I’ll have to send some clickie love your way.
Superb customer service is definitely a prerequisite. When you get poor support, your site’s success gets stalled — that’s not good.
I’m still really disappointed that my previous host’s customer service went downhill and I had to quit using their service. It was nice being on a first name basis with the owner.
Although, business is business and you can’t let too many feelings get in the way. I agree that poor service can stall your success; I’ve seen it happen on my sites before.
Some pretty good specs there, but how much do you end up paying each month?
I have heard great things about site5, good luck. I am expanding my hosting to more providers and will have to look into them.
Definitely check them out. I am very pleased with them so far.
Mike: Your comment got captured as spam, but I rescued it.
If you pay for an entire year for $99, it works out to $8.25 per month. If you pay two years in advance for $149, it’s $6.21 per month.
These figures are deeply discounted for the promotion they are running. The normal price is $323.40 per year, which is $26.95 per month. This is still much lower than I was paying before, so it’s fine with me.
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What is your hosting before site5? I heard from my colleague that site5 performance already drop. I means that their service and support are not as good as their service at the first they established.
about space and bandwidth I seen many hosting provide big space and bandwidth.
I wasn’t going to mention them, but I guess i can. My previous hosting provider was Worldwide Mart (worldwidemart.com).
I am still pleased with Site5’s performance and support. I learned my lesson the last time: if the performance and support start to suffer, I’ll be looking for another provider. There are just too many quality hosts around to be deal with bad service.
I think support is more important than uptime and I had no problems with both so I am a lucky guy and I will stay another year with my hosting company. I see so many bad reviews for other companies every day….