How to choose a hosting company for your website

Does your host know what you want to do? Email them first with your intentions. See what they say. Most specialise. If you get a standard response, be wary. The lesson I learned with web hosting is that companies who haven’t been taken over by Internet conglomerates are better than those that have. My experience was all about trial and error. If you choose a host and things don’t work, don’t hesitate to use the 30 day money back get out clause. Here’s my web hosting story.

In May 07 after years of working well my Powweb site, a Wordpress blog, started running ridiculously slowly. It wasn’t the only slow site hosted by Powweb. The Powweb community forum was full of complaints: as slow as molasses, they said. Saving a new post could take an hour and most times it would give up altogether.

Powweb sent messages saying things would get better. By August things were still painfully slow. Then Powweb upgraded to MySQL 5 and things stopped altogether.

I had two sites at Powweb so I decided to switch the slow one to another host. Strangely, my remaining Powweb site continues to be fine.

Wordpress themselves have a list of hosts. Top of the list was Bluehost. I joined Bluehost and paid $160 for two years of hosting. The money went out but no welcoming email came back. I found out how to set up the FTP client using their online help. I sent Bluehost’s technical support an email to say the FTP client wasn’t working. Was I entering the correct server name? 24 hours later, when the client had started working, the reply came into my Bulk Mail folder and I nearly missed it.

I had to email them again. How do I transfer the database? cPanel only had a button for creating a new database but I already had a database. Where was the import button? Over 24 hours later they emailed my Bulk Mail folder again saying I had to create the database and then import the .SQL file from Powweb.

Back at Powweb, phpMyAdmin, the software for saving databases timed out so I couldn’t get a copy of my SQL database. Some helpful Powweb community forum people said the .DMP file that Powweb created automatically would work. Bluehost said it wouldn’t. It didn’t.

That evening my Bluehost cPanel started running slowly. Next day it wouldn’t load at all. So I decided to quit Bluehost. I took the 30 day money back option and sent an email to the Billing Dept. They came back with security questions which I answered and that was that, my short time at Bluehost ceased. I emailed Wordpress