Well, the site migration is done, all little glitches worked out (like the server config htaccess thing on my root level that gave me a choice of a slightly broken index page or a 500 server error) and this server is fastfastfast. No problems that I can see at all. Please do drop a comment here if you spot anything I might have missed.

Since I’ve been through NUMEROUS hosting issues in the last year, I decided that even though I’ve been ECSTATIC with downtownhost.com for my reseller account since I moved from the GRIDLOCK SERVER at MediaTemple two months ago, I didn’t want to put ALL my eggs in any one basket when it came to hosting, especially since my reseller account was only ON MediaTemple for two months, after hostgator double billed me and I abandoned them. Yeah, six sites migrated three times in six months, that’s more than anyone should have to deal with, and since MT wasn’t Cpanel, they were Manual site migrations in and out of there, a real PITA.

Also, in addition to being leery of having all my sites on one server, I prefer kickasswebdesign.com to be in a completely different location and IP block than my other sites since this is the one with the google juice and I don’t want to dilute the value of links from this site to my other sites.

I chose HostingZoom.com, based on recommendations from WebHostingTalk.com. I love that forum, a bunch of nice people (some of them are the owners of the hosting companies, and the rules against them soliciting are pretty strict, which means they can only answer questions or head off problems.) I found DowntownHost the same way, through the Web Hosting Talk forum, and my experience with DowntownHost has been totally cool, they’re VERY customer-centric, not to mention just plain personable.

I hope I don’t ever have to use the forum for finding a host again, but when you consider that I used to sing the praises of below10host.com as recently as 6 months ago, and hosted with them on and off (mostly on) for almost ten years, I know that the quality of hosting can turn on a SysAdmin. If there’s a change at that level, everything can go to hell, and that’s what happened at below10host.com, leaving me to scramble fixing scripts that used to work and, in one particularly bad case, having to pull stuff manually out of a completely corrupted database to reconstruct a site on a new host’s server. What a nightmare! And now most scripts won’t even INSTALL at below10host, since they’re so strict in the way they have mod_security settings running. I doubt anything other than wordpress will work there, and on some of their servers Wordpress doesn’t even work. They used mod_security to turn off the xml-rpc function on the server bitchslappin.net was on, so I couldn’t ping the update services or use trackbacks, which is when I first moved the reseller account. That STUPID mod_security setting effectively took away the ability for me to get google juice with wordpress on anything hosted on that server. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re out of business within a year or two, since the web is moving to more and more dynamically driven sites. If you can’t run them there, they’re dead in the water.

So Kickass was the last site I had to move. Since getting the migration done on this massive site involved having HostingZoom migrate my huge WP database and directory db for me, then me recreating db users and changing config files, and since the server was configured differently than my old host, there was quite a bit of back and forth with support on this one. I have to say I was pretty pleased overall, with my only complaint being I had to repeat myself (probably a shift change!) but the server config problem did get fixed within approximately 6 hours from when I reported it, and after some back and forth with trying different things to isolate why and where the problem was occurring. Now things are loading SO MUCH FASTER it’s really wonderful. The comparison on how the site loads now compared to yesterday before the nameserver change is really very noticeable. I have a feeling these guys will be fine, based on what I’ve seen already. I sure hope so.

You have no clue how much I hope so.

Technorati Tags: Web Hosting Problem, MediaTemple, Below10Host, Good WebHosting, WebHosting Reviews, DownTownHost.com, HostingZoom.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 6:42 pmunder Personal Stuff and . Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.