You simply can’t take good service by a web hosting vendor for granted, no matter how long you have been with them.
The Honeymoon
I was quite happy with my now ex-web hosting vendor for a couple of years. My site was fairly quick and seemingly reliable (at least I didn’t notice many, if any, service outages), the vendor’s tech support staff responded quickly and effectively the few times I raised questions or concerns, and the cost of the service was, well, dirt cheap! What could be better? I was so pleased with the vendor that I started recommending them to other people.
The End of the Honeymoon
But times change, and the service provided by a web hosting vendor can, too. A few months ago when I tried to access the site my browser reported a “site unreachable” error. Hmmm! Opened a chat session with someone from the tech support staff and asked what was going on. After a some delay, the response was “Oh, we’re re-booting the server.” No explanation as to why, but, oh well — the site was back up and running in a few minutes. Didn’t think too much about it, at least until I had the same problem a few days later.
Over the next few weeks things went from a little “sketchy” to much worse. As the frequency of outages increased, so did my level of concern. I started asking the tech support person more pointed questions about why this was happening so often. The answers they gave were varied, but always incredibly vague. Either they didn’t know, or didn’t want to tell. But each time I complained, sure enough, the site was back up again in a few minutes. This got me wondering: how often is the site down for periods of time when I don’t even notice it? And how is it the site comes back up so quickly each time? It seemed like the server administrators were simply reacting to customer complaints — not proactively monitoring the performance of the servers to fix problems before customers like me would notice or complain.
The vendor’s responses to these more pointed questions were even more vague. However, one agent confided: “The servers are old, and we know we’re having problems with them. We’re moving to a new data center in a couple of months and replacing the servers. If you can hang on for a while, it will all be better.” It amazed me that this agent would speak so honestly. (Were they speaking honestly? Who knows. Only one agent mentioned this. The others always just said, “We’re working with the system admins to solve your downtime problem.”)
The Break-up
Last week, the site was down almost every other time I tried to login to it. I had had it, and I decided to open an account with another hosting vendor, transfer the site — lock, stock and barrel — to the new vendor and bid a not-so-fond farewell to the old vendor. Once I finally made the decision, my life improved immediately! The transfer process was quick, clean, free and painless. All I had to do was to open the account with the new vendor, Host Gator, and submit a form requesting them to transfer the site. Host Gator took care of the rest. Once the transfer was complete, I simply had to change the DNS nameserver settings for my domain to point to the Host Gator nameservers. (Sounds complicated, but it’s not — they tell you exactly how to do it.) My site experienced no downtime whatsoever, and you are reading this post from the site’s new home on a Host Gator server.
Lessons Learned
- Check your site regularly to ensure it is performing well — not just that it is up and running, but also that response time is acceptable. How often should you do this? That depends on your site and how critical it is to you and your audience. High traffic e-commerce sites should be monitored constantly — and selecting the right hosting service becomes very critical. Personal blogs? Well, not so much — maybe at least once a week. (Hopefully you are making some additions or changes at least once a week anyway.) Small business sites: probably at least once a day.
- Pay attention to and keep a record of how often outages or slow performance occur. If you start to notice that outages are occurring on more than a very occasional basis, start asking the vendor those more pointed questions. If things don’t improve immediately, you might try asking your vendor to move your site to another one of their servers. (This did work for me once — at least temporarily — with my old vendor.)
- Most importantly: don’t be afraid to switch vendors. There are so many web hosting vendors out there, you shouldn’t feel married to any one vendor, no matter how long your site has been with them. As noted above, the transfer process can be quite simple and easy, at least if you go with the right new vendor. What about the money you may have paid for the service contract with your old vendor? Check with the vendor to see if they will give you a refund for any unused time on your service contract. Most of them will. But even if they don’t, consider how much money you really will be out by cutting that vendor loose. Web hosting is a cheap commodity. If your site means much to you and your audience, the choice between writing off a few bucks spent on a poor hosting service and providing a more reliable, responsive web experience for your audience should be an easy one to make.