Switched Hosting Companies

Does this website feel snappier?

I just finished migrating all of my web hosting away from GoDaddy and onto HostGator. For those of you who didn’t understand what that last sentence meant:  this webpage you’re reading needs to be stored on a computer somewhere, so that you can then come along and see it. For the last eight years or so, my websites have been living on machines owned by this company called GoDaddy. This weekend, I moved everything over to a different company.

I have much good to say about GoDaddy. I’ve had no perceptible downtime even after being slashdotted/dugg/reddited, they never lost my data, I had positive experiences dealing with their customer service, and they were cheap.

On the negative side, dealing with their website to manage my account meant being assaulted with endless ads. They spared no opportunity to present you with yet another way to give them your money. The interface to manage my web hosting was mediocre. Their logs were pretty poor, unless you paid them more. Most importantly, it was slow at rendering the pages for this blog.

I looked online, and the consensus seemed to be that HostGator or BlueHost was the way to go. I signed up with HostGator, and started backing up all my databases and content to make the jump. My computer downloaded approximately 13,000 files in the process. I uploaded 7,000 back to HostGator, doing some spring cleaning in the process. Then this morning, I completed the switch by editing the name servers with my registrar.

I’ve stored the original website and all its 13,000 files in a special spot, because it’s become a bit of a time capsule. I’ve found traces of my life from my teenage years onwards; files that were deleted from my computers eons ago but lived on in a server in cyberspace.

It’s been awesome to stumble on this stuff.

Anywho, so far so good with HostGator. Managing my website with them is very straight forward and responsive. I don’t have to do a bunch of google searches to figure out how to carry out basic tasks, such as figuring out name servers. There are logs galore. Most importantly, I’ve noticed a significant decrease in the time it takes for my web pages to load.

In other news, I’ve used this opportunity to consolidate my registrars (another important cog in making websites work) so that one company manages my .ca’s and .com’s.  I’ve also terminated a number of websites I had operated, such as the parody (Get) Down With Jesus, pictured above. Finally, I locked down the different components to make it harder to compromise.