I’ve moved web hosts again. Or rather, I’ve moved back. Many moons ago I had hosting with the fine chaps at UK Websolutions Direct. They provided an excellent service, but I wanted to do more fancy things with my hosting, so I moved to a VPS with Rapidswitch. For a while I was managing my own email, and hosting my domains on this little box. However, I’d neglected to think about the fact said box needs to be maintained.
My problem was I’d spend all day at work maintaining boxes, then come home and occasionally have to maintain another box. Not only that but I was paying the best part of £10 a month for this. It just suddenly didn’t add up any more. I had a look for some new hosting and was recommended iPage.
Their support was excellent, and their package was very generous (for the price). The problem was, their hosting is in the US in Boston. It seems their routing and peering is really not up to capacity, so page load times were horrendous. They actually use the caching system Akmai to give better page load times, and it’s a freebie for UK customers; in hindsight, that should’ve set off the alarm bells. With dynamic content like a WordPress blog, it’s really a pointless endeavour using caching as it was the initial connection and page load which took time, not pulling down static content like images. Although the images were slow too they weren’t as noticeable as staring at a blank page for anything up to ten seconds. I also host the bnluk.net site, and it just wasn’t good enough, as it was frustrating users.
The final nail in the coffin came earlier this week when their database server decided to hose itself, and my databases with it. It came back up, seemingly OK, but the databases weren’t working properly. I resurrected it and then started looking for new hosts.
After a great many recommendations from various people I found myself back at UKWSD, signing up to a slightly higher tier of service than I’d had before, which gave me the extra scope to host what I wanted. The account was set up in no time, all the data slurped over, and the DNS was switched. iPage refunded me my hosting charges.
If I was hosting a site aimed at US-based users, then I’d possibly use iPage again, but for UK-based users it’s a no-go. It’s a shame because as I say, their support and general service was great. Just a shame their network isn’t.
Rapidswitch were in the throes of migrating all their VPS customers to a sister company’s platform, and my cancellation request seemed to have dropped through the cracks, so I now need to unravel that too. I still need to tidy up my domain registrations – they’re between two hosts still!
But, I DO have two working domains. So that’s the main thing. All thanks to UK Websolutions Direct.
