Changing web hosting companies, Part 1

[I know I promised this weeks ago, but the story turned out to be more complicated than I originally thought. So rather than delay the whole thing, I decided to publish it in several parts. Here’s Part 1.]

Last month I switched hosting companies. I had never done this before, so I approached the task with some trepidation. Everything seems to have turned out just fine (so far, anyway – knock on wood).

As promised, in this post I’ll share why web hosting matters and why I decided to switch. In Part 2, I’ll give you an idea of the decision-making process I went through. Finally, in Part 3 I’ll list the hosting companies I looked at and explain how I settled on my new hosting company, A2 Hosting.

First, a word about what web hosting is and why it matters. (Update: For some basic background information on domain names and hosting companies and how owning your own domain is different from being assigned an address by your Internet service provider, see the tutorial here.)

I’ve owned my own domain names since 1995. When you own your own domain name, you get to control your online identity in a way that isn’t possible if you leave the job up to an Internet service provider. For starters, you can set up any e-mail accounts you want for the domain you own, and you can create mailing lists for projects or to help groups of people stay in touch; it’s an ideal set of tools for small businesses and families (and family businesses, for that matter). If you use an ISP’s domain name, you have to rebuild your entire online persona every time you move or switch ISPs. You have to reprint your business cards and notify every friend and every bank, brokerage, and online business. Over the past 10 years, I’ve had six different ISPs in three different states, but I’ve been able to keep the same e-mail address every time.

The other advantage of owning your own domain is that you can manage your own website, using any software you choose. I’ve maintained a presence on the web since 1999, with this blog starting up in 2002. When you run a website, having your own domain is crucial to maintaining an identity. I switched from Movable Type software to WordPress last year, and most visitors to this place never even noticed. If I had been signed up with a hosted service like Blogger, or TypePad or WordPress.com, I would have had to discard my old address when I moved, and in the process I would have lost thousands of visitors a month for several months, at least.

Signing up with a hosting company is the easiest way to manage e-mail and web access for your own domain. It doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive, and these days it’s no big deal to have a so-called vanity domain. In my case, it’s a crucial business asset, and I’ve got plans to build additional websites for some exciting projects before the year is out. So reliable service is important to me.

Beginning shortly after the new year, I had a run of unfortunate occurrences with the company that was handling hosting chores for me, 123ehost.com. At least once a week, I experienced outages of one to four hours, ususally during business hours; that was enough to be mildly annoying. But on January 23 this site and Ed Bott’s Media Central went completely dark, and my incoming and outgoing e-mail servers vanished as well. When I finally reached support, they told me that my account had been receiving thousands of spam e-mails, that other clients on the same server had been complaining, and that they had decided to move my account to another server to reduce the impact on other customers. Unfortunately, they didn’t bother to tell me before beginning the move. The net result was that my three websites and all e-mail functions were offline for the better part of a day. To make matters worse, they did an incomplete job of moving my SQL databases to the new server. These databases are where all the posts and comments and other building blocks that make a blog are stored. If the database disappears and can’t be properly restored, the blog is literally just a shell, without all those years’ worth of writing and screen shots and comments. Losing a database is a disaster to a serious blogger. (Just ask Peter Near. Ouch! Sorry, Peter.)

With the database errors, even when visitors were able to connect to the server, they were likely to get error messages instead of the page they expected. It took nearly a week to get everything sorted out. It didn’t help that all this began happening the week my father died, so I was away from the office and trying to communicate with support personnel from a series of unfamiliar PCs.

I sent a complaint to the management of 123ehost.com and received no reply. Then, a few weeks later, my accounts went offline again. This time it was an eight-hour outage that affected every customer of 123ehost.com – “router problems,” apparently. That was the last straw – I asked you to help me choose a new hosting company, and I got an amazing number of helpful responses: 19 comments, a dozen or so e-mail messages, and some interesting insights via IM. I made up my mind to switch on a Friday and gave myself a short deadline so I could have the whole switch done over the holiday weekend.

Coming up in Part 2: What I look for in a hosting company.