Even though I liked my old hosting place for The Snarfshop and had no problems with them at all, I basically outgrew them, so I had to switch hosting providers. Sorry for any downtime. It took 3-4 days for my ISP to get the new host DNS info and I couldn’t work on the site until then. I kept hitting my old server when everyone else was seeing the new one (which wasn’t fully working). But now, at last everything is A-OK again.
Searching for a new host is like trying to find a new significant other. Will they be compatible? Will we have a good and long lasting relationship? Do they offer what I need at a reasonable price? Err, maybe the last one doesn’t exactly go with a new girlfriend/boyfriend I guess. Thats more like a escort. Like a Ford Escort, yeah. Maybe looking for a new host is like shopping for a new car…yeah, thats a better analogy.
I spent a week searching and researching and narrowed it down to three hosts that looked good to me. At first I was going to go with Bluehost, with 1,500GB of space and 15,00GB bandwidth at $6.95/month. They looked like they had everything I needed at a good price.
Then I found PowWeb with the same major features but at $5.77/month. Which really looked good too at a lower cost. Of course the small details you get with a host are always important too, and it looked like Bluehost
has them all covered a little more than PowWeb
. The best thing I like about PowWeb
is that they have just the one option for hosting. Take it or leave it. Nice and simple. So save a little money at the cost of features I may or may not ever use or spend a little more? Its always a hard decision when you sign up for a year at a time.
The next one on my list was StartLogic. The same basic features as the rest at 1,500GB storage space and 15,000GB of bandwidth at $5.95/month. Which sat at mid-range for cost on my top 3 choices.
Who should I choose for a new host? All three looked good and the features and costs are pretty similar. Its like trying to decide which delicious pie you want. The apple, peach, or cherry, when you like all three. Oh wait, I mean which car you best. I forgot we were using a car analogy. The green one, the gold one or the red one. MMmm, pie.
What ultimately sold me was StartLogic’s transfer price of $2.95/month your first year if you are switching hosts. Which for me was perfect since I was switching hosts. StartLogic
had all my bases covered with their hosting plan and I could save some money at the same time, so I went with them.
Now that the DNS is finally propagated for everyone (hopefully), so far so good. I’ve got everything working again and the website seems to run a lot faster now. Should not be getting those 10 second to 30 second to infinity load times like before from an overworked database.
