My site has recently moved hosting providers. This comes after 3-years at a perfectly good host, Hostinger. The problem is, the current business model for hosts goes something like this: “Get Started Today for Just $3/month (for the first year)”. Or, if you’re lucky, you might pay a bit more, but you can get it for a three year contract. After that, the costs were scheduled to roughly double. So, I can pay for three or maybe four years at a reduced rate, but after that I was going to have to pay more than $8/month for a pre-paid four year period.
My problem is that I’m cheap. Once that value of $3 to $5/month has been established in that first three years, that’s what I want to pay moving forward. Not $8/month for exactly the same service.
I get it, the hosting service is giving me a reduced rate to hopefully get me in there, figuring that the relative pain in the ass that it is to move my site will exceed the additional costs I will incur. Well, they just don’t know me very well, do they?
I even contacted customer service to see if they’d rather lose me as a customer than give me a continuation of my reduced rate and they were not interested in having that conversation, let me tell you! They basically wished me a “Good Day, Sir!” and I began to look for another hosting company.
Now, it’s not wrong that it’s kind of a pain to move sites. There’s a lot of moving of data around, but I addressed that last cycle by starting to use Git to store the code for site in a publicly accessible repository.
Then there was the blog. My blog is based on WordPress and I tried to use now fewer than half a dozen (free) plugins to migrate my site from one place to another and it was not going well! Half of them would only work if you had a tiny blog or had other similar limitations. Half of them just failed quietly and unexpectedly. In the end, the one that worked for me was Total Upkeep.
Even that came with challenges. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t move the DNS that points to my website till I’ve tested that everything is in place and functional. What this means was I would install the blog to some obscure temporary URL that I though would work for testing, but, it turns out that all the pieces don’t really want to work with some temporary URL, they want to work with the final URL (mossor.org/blog). What this necessitated was a leap of faith where I had to switch the DNS settings to point at my new site and then install my blog and restore it from backup.
Now, I realize my blog is not exactly a highly trafficked site, so the risk was low, but it still irked me from a testability perspective.
Additionally, I’m still having some difficulty with email at the new site, so I’m working with Customer Support on that, but it’s not quick. My email firstnamelastname@gmail.com still works, but anything that was going to whatever@mossor.org is currently going to the bitbucket. Also irritating, but not immensely impactful.
So, apologies if someone sees any issues or hiccups, but it’s a work in progress and I saved about half of that almost $400. Because I’m cheap and I kind of still enjoy solving technical problems, so it’s worth it to me in the end.
0 Comments