Last week I opened a discussion on the blog titled “What is Your Favorite Web Hosting?“. That is quite a coincidence because when I wrote that I was not planning to move the blog anywhere, I just wanted to give my feedback from previous hosting experiences, and thought that it would be useful for the readers if they could also share theirs and read recommendations from other people.
I tried to talk with the customer support to see if we could solve the problem somehow, but there was nothing they could do about it. Most companies guarantee 99,5% of uptime, and that translates to 3 hours and 36 minutes of allowed downtime every month. Frankly that is not good enough for me.
I had not decided to move yet, but on Friday the blog went down for over an hour, and on Saturday it went down several times during the day, summing almost 2 hours of downtime (I track that with Pingdom.com). That made it for me. The situation was so bad that the support tried to offer me one free month of hosting.
Anyway yesterday I made the switch, and DBT is now hosted on a Doreo server. My other blogs are already hosted there, and they had 20 minutes of downtime over the past 8 months, so hopefully it will continue like this.
1. Set the TTL to a low value before making the transfer.
TTL stands for time to live, and it regulates how many transmissions a piece of computer data can go before being discarded. Your DNS records (the information connecting your domain to your hosting server) have a TTL, which is usually set a one day. That means that if you update your nameservers today (making them point to the new hosting company) it might take up to 24 hours before people actually start seeing your site on the new server. This may cause all sorts of problems, from the lost of comments and emails to some visitors not being able to access the site at all.
2. Prefer hostings that offer cPanel
In the past I had already transfered this blog between two different servers. One of them was not using cPanel, though, so I was forced to copy and restore all the site files and MySQL databases manually. It worked well, but somehow when I was restoring the databases it messed up some special characters on my blog posts, and I needed to fix them one by one, on over 200 posts…
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