Sunday, February 1, 2009
Moving to another web server this month
Sometime this month I expect to be moving both The Enid Blyton Society and my own EnidBlyton.net to a new server. My current web server host, Modwest, seems to be falling by the wayside. I've been using them for perhaps eight years now, and can only sing their praises in terms of customer service; their staff members are helpful, polite, and well-spoken (or perhaps well-written is more accurate), and they obviously care about their customers. If we're talking purely about customer service, I highly recommend Modwest — however, a nice team of people doesn't necessarily mean the fastest, most reliable web hosting service.
Their servers and control panels have always been a little slow to me. Every time I work on databases, it's like wading through treacle. Most servers use PHPMyAdmin, which is a graphical interface that allows you to work on MySQL databases, which is what I use on all my sites. Many of my website clients have their own web space, with their own web server hosts, so I've been able to use the same PHPMyAdmin interface on different systems. By direct comparison I realized long ago that Modwest's installation is by far the slowest, and I've grumbled about this under my breath for years, even complained to them several times.
Modwest's OnSite control panel (for setting up web accounts, mailboxes, etc) is a pretty nice system, but again, is often incredibly slow, and often times out while trying to load the page. This has been getting worse and worse over the years, and so I've been looking about for alternative hosts for quite a long time. But, in recent months, Modwest has been "down" more times than I care to think about. In the last couple of weeks alone they've had some kind of issue that has caused many websites to be unavailable in the early hours of the morning (U.S. time). Both EnidBlyton.net and The Enid Blyton Society websites have been affected by this at various times, not to mention a number of clients who have phoned me to vent their annoyance.
There's another reason I want to move too. Modwest prices aren't bad, but competition is stiff these days. For less money I can now get six times the amount of web space and over eight times more bandwidth.
So it's time to move on. I've given Modwest a lot of slack. I've reported many minor but annoying bugs in their system, but without the slightest improvement being noticed. While their customer service is good for immediate issues, you realize after a while that nothing is actually getting done in the long term. Their hardware sucks and, although they've been working to improve it over the last couple of years (according to their blog), nothing seems to be happening. I feel like technology is moving on without them.
I'm done waiting. I now have a new host, one of the most dominant and popular hosts out there: HostGator. Of course you're going to read a number of horror stories about the company, but the vast majority of reviews are good. Price isn't the issue here, although a saving is obviously a bonus; I'll take it, thankyouverymuch! What amazes me is that the cheaper price gets me far more disk space and bandwidth, which I now need. What amazes me even more is how fast and zippy everything is. When I go to work in the control panel, I can click and click and click without waiting. Lovely!
So far so good. But even HostGator's system isn't perfect. What really matters works great — uptime, reliability, speed — but there are functions in the control panel that just don't work, and when I ask tech support about it, I'm told, "Oh, that's not enabled in your account. Just ignore it." Ignore it? How about disabling the darn thing so I can't spend half an hour trying to figure out why it doesn't work?? And the typos... It galls me to find spelling mistakes and errors in control panel systems. It stinks of a bunch of amateurs who don't really care much. Imagine if you navigated around Windows XP or Vista, or used Microsoft Word, and kept finding typos in the instructions. You just don't expect that. You take for granted that the people who designed these systems can actually spell, or if they can't, that there's at least one person in the team who can proof everything. *Sigh*
Anyway — the whole point of this post is to advise that, at some point, I'll be shifting both sites to HostGator. There shouldn't be any downtime, although I may have to pause the message boards and forums temporarily to avoid losing any posts between the old server and new. When I copy the entire database to the new server, it may take a while to get it all working correctly, and if any new messages get posted in that time, they'll be posting to the old site, not the new one. So expect a short period of time when messages cannot be posted, especially on the Society's forums. And expect to find a few bugs here and there; HostGator's system is configured slightly differently in some ways, so I have to make some adjustments here and there throughout the sites.
Not sure when this will happen yet, except that it'll be in February. I'll give y'all advance warning though!
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