Switching Web Hosts: A Weekend in the Life of a Web Developer

I know our web site doesn’t get much traffic on the weekends, but if you happened to visit on Saturday night or Sunday morning, you may have noticed that this site was down.  This was due to the fact that I was in the process of changing web hosting providers.

I had been with my last hosting provider, Hosting for Sites, a little over two years now.  I hadn’t heard many things about them, but they had cheap hosting plans ($12.95/month) and offered a fair amount of web space (8 GB) for my sites to grow.

Throughout the first year, I didn’t have many bad things to say about them, nor did I have many things to say about them at all.  Their web servers seemed to be a little slow, but that could be overlooked due to the price.  I never experienced any significant problems until February of this year when I noticed that their web server was down for a significant amount of time, or so I thought.

I was in the process of putting together my wrestling blog site, www.thehexagoncircle.com, when suddenly the connection was dropped.  I figured that the server was down and waited a bit and did what I was able to do without having access to the site.  A couple of hours went by and I still couldn’t access that web site, nor any of the other ones that I had hosted through them, so I decided to email their support team.

I got a response back from them about an hour later informing me that their web servers were running in tip-top shape.  I responded back and told him that it was strange since I haven’t been able to connect to any of my sites.  He wrote back to tell me that their firewall had blocked my IP address and that he removed the block, thus I was then able to access my web sites once again.

That was the first strike against them and shortly after I began to like their service less and less.  Their server speeds were starting to get on my nerves and it seemed to take forever to receive email, so I began hunting around for another hosting provider.

Changing hosting providers is something that I think everyone in my field dreads.  If you are only moving one small site, it is not that bad, however, I host nearly a dozen web sites and moving that many can be time consuming.  Very time consuming.

I had heard a lot of things about HostGator and know a few people who use their service who had good things to say about.  I decided to look around and found that their plans were cheaper ($9.95) than my Hosting for Sites and also offered a lot more space (600 GB) than Hosting for Sites.

It was time for me to figure out the pros and cons of each.  For three dollars less a month I could have a ton of more space or for three dollars more a month I wouldn’t have to go through the task of switching.  I thought about it for a while and I just never found the energy to spend an entire weekend to switch everything.

Until, that is, a decision was forced upon me.

On Thursday evening my email went down.  It was still down when I went to check it before I went to bed.  Knowing that I am able to check my email online through a web based program, I tried to login to that and found out that my account had been suspended.

I thought back and remembered that I had just been emailed recently that my automatic credit card payment had gone through, so it shouldn’t have been a billing issue.  I decided to email their support with a Gmail account that I have, since my regular email was down, and decided to go to bed as their responses aren’t usually the fastest.

The next morning I woke up and read their response saying that my account had been suspended as I had uploaded a spam script that emailed thousands of people before they had to shut it down.  Seeing as I’m not one to do something like that, I wrote back and pleaded my case, but they didn’t seem to receptive to it.  Luckily for me, they only suspended my inlinefusion.com account, which I only use for email.  All of the rest of my web sites were still live.

Since I was going to be fighting a losing battle, I decided it was time to make the switch.  Plus, why would I want to give money to a provider who doesn’t believe one of their customers.  You know, a customer who hosts several small web sites and hasn’t caused any problems for them or their servers in the two years that he had been with them.  Those two years must have been a cleaver ruse for my email spamming operation.  Or it could have been that someone hacked into my web site or put it there.  You can believe whichever one you’d like to.

At any rate, I woke up at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning and opened an account with HostGator and began the long process of switching hosts. 

Just so you know what it all entails, I have to make a local backup of everything on the server.  All of the files and images need to be downloaded to my computer, including the database.  Once I have all of that, I login to my domain name registrar and switch the domain name to point to my new server.  

Once that is changed, I created an account for the web site on my new server and uploaded the entire web site to it.  Depending on the size, that can take anywhere from a minute to 10 minutes.  This particular site is one of the bigger ones that I have and it took nearly 10 minutes to put all 2,874 of the files on the server.

By the end of the day on Saturday, I had already finished switching six of the sites over.  Today, I finished the other five and I will be canceling my old hosting account.  I haven’t run into any problems thus far and I hope it stays that way.  It maybe just me, but I do think that the web sites are loading faster than before.

Plus, I’d hate to have to do this once again in the near future.

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