What to know when changing website hosts

A couple of weeks ago I found the fol­low­ing in an email from my webhost:

Your web host­ing account for bradgrier.com has been deac­tiv­ated (reason: site caus­ing per­form­ance prob­lems).
Although your web site has been dis­abled, your data may still be avail­able for
up to 15 days, after which it will be deleted.

After a quick call to the ever-helpful cus­tomer ser­vice line, I’d learned that I’d exceed my alloc­ated CPU or SQL cycles. With my simple little Word­Press blog.

It seems that a plu­gin (or two) had taken too many resources too many times for them. They are a very large (per­haps the largest) web­host offer­ing unlim­ited everything…except CPU and SQL cycles.

At the time, I did my research and they seemed like a very good choice. Great cus­tomer ser­vices, few com­plaints, and always rated highly in the reviews.

Per­haps a little more research would have been in order. It seems the ‘unlim­ited’ web hosts build their busi­ness model on over­sell­ing resources, hence the jeal­ous guard­ing of those two resources — should one cus­tomer (me) take too many, then it impacts oth­ers. I’m now a liab­il­ity and expendable.

So much for unlimited.

Then they asked me to leave.  Jilted. Expended.

I wasn’t given the oppor­tun­ity to fix the issue, they just wanted me gone and I had 15 days to trans­ition. I was not a happy camper.

Luck­ily I’d setup an auto­mated backup sys­tem for my blog. Posts and com­ments were safe. I’d just be exper­i­en­cing down­time on the blog, lost time in my search to find a new host, and lost time as I set up the new account.

To make a long and tedi­ous story short and snappy, here’s a few things I’d learned as I rebuilt this blog.

Backup
Again, I can’t stress this enough. Backup’s are essen­tial. Without it, you lose every bit of value you’d built. You lose your long tail. Auto­mated backups are easy to set up. There’s no excuse for not hav­ing a cur­rent backup of your blog.

Why are you here?
What niche does your blog fill? Now’s the per­fect oppor­tun­ity to reflect. Are your per­sonal rewards enough to jus­tify the move and rebuild pro­cess? Should you change your blog focus, design, lay­out, niche, whatever? As long as you’re going to be chan­ging hosts, look at what else you can change while your site is in trans­ition (I changed the theme and inves­ted in Thesis. More on that later )

Ask for help.
Enlist your friends and mem­bers of your social media net­work. I put out a call on Twit­ter and received a bunch of favour­able recom­mend­a­tions to fol­low up. Your friends are usu­ally a great resource.

Know what you’re look­ing for, and what you’ll settle for.
I thought I’d done a lot of research before select­ing my past one. I had, but I’d been search­ing for the wrong things. I was dazzled by unlim­ited band­width, unlim­ited stor­age, unlim­ited unlim­ited­ness! I didn’t under­stand that in order to offer unlim­ited (almost)everything, they’d  severely limit CPU and SQL cycles.

In my case, I’ve changed my needs. I shopped for a spe­cific pack­age that LIMITED band­width, stor­age, etc. By doing this, a pro­vider and cus­tomer know their bounds and expect­a­tions are managed.

It also helps to open a dia­logue with your pro­spect­ive ‘busi­ness part­ners’, rather than simply sign­ing up. In my case, I asked about resource usage, sus­pen­sions, and the abil­ity to fix issues, rather than simply ‘being expelled’.

The end is the begin­ning.
So here I am, on a new web host, a leaner and meaner blog. You’ll see it develop over the next few weeks as I con­tinue refin­ing, and learn­ing about the Thesis theme.

Stay tuned, and feel free to leave your thoughts!

Image cour­tesy Locator

Tagged as: Blogging, Business, Customer Service, frustration, Hosting, Lifestyle Technology, Social Media