Well I’ve just have one of the more crazy months of my life, at least as far as web sites go. You see the host that I have three websites on decided to “sell out” and completely changed over owners and management. Somewhere in that process my three websites went down for pretty much three full days. After that I decided I should find some place else as the change of owners scared me a bit. So I try and contact the support people to get my domains transferred… A day goes by, two days, three days a week and I don’t hear anything from them despite bombarding them with emails. Finally I get really fed up and threaten legal action (hey, domains are really important) and they finally respond assisting me in the domain transfer process.
Since I have three sites and might end up getting more (working on doing more website work) I figured a resellers account would be good. So I signed up for one of them and just finished transferring the site yesterday. Just in the nick of time too as I got a email this morning saying the shared hosting server I was on had been hacked and all data lost… Lovely!
Anyway, I’ve learned some important things from this.
- Don’t be sucked in by the whole “free domain with a hosting account” crap, keep your domain at a larger domain registrar like godaddy, joker, dotster, etc..
- Don’t have your domain at the same place as you host. Its just not worth it if something happens to that host. I say this because larger hosting places like godaddy and dreamhost don’t generally provide the level of service and reliability (at least on the shared hosting or smaller reseller accounts) as a smaller, reputable host does.
- Lastly, don’t pay for a year in advance. Stick to a month to month or every quarter. The potential savings are just not worth the hassle of trying to get money back if (its a big if admittedly) something goes wrong.
Let me just close with this: the internet is a ever changing place… I was perfectly happy with the host I had for over a year. They had good uptime, a very helpful staff and decent prices. But in the world of the internet anything can happen.
