Goodbye Netfirms, Hello Hostgator
As some of you will know, I’ve been hosting computer-aid.com.au with netfirms for nearly 2 years.
My netfirms hosting plan ends in November 2010, but after a welcome improvement in service when Dan Kershaw took the reigns earlier this year, I found that customer service took a serious nose-diveĀ once Dan and Netfirms parted company.
So I decided I cannot wait until November, I’ll bail out now.
So I switched to Hostgator.
Besides the unknown of switching to a new host, I wasn’t looking forward to the huge effort in moving my website and wordpress blog to another host. Its particularly difficult because Netfirms do not use the standard Cpanel, so I would need to get my hands dirty and do database transfers, etc.
I then noticed that Hostgator will actually transfer 1 website (or multiple websites if hosted via a single cpanel), as part of the signup deal.
OK, on the day, there were some little problems with the transfer (eg getting US and Australian timezones mixed up, and a strange Apache password problem with my wordpress admin area, but all the time, the hostgator people responded quickly, and fixed the problems.
Overall, hardly anyone noticed that I had changed hosts… which is the way it should be!
So, although its early days yet, I can say hello to Hostgator!
I’ve been with HostGator for years.
Great people to deal with and fast to respond.
I think I’ve had 3 problems in 5 years (I think its been 5 maybe more).
Having been with hostgator for nearly 1 month now, there are some very obvious differences in the website statistics I’ve been gathering:
– awstats would only work intermittently on netfirms, but is 100% reliable on hostgator.
– even when netfirms awstats worked, it seemed to have a “cap” on the number of unique visitors, and now that I’m with hostgator, it “appears” like I now have double the traffic.
– Google Analytics shows no change in traffic
– Google webmaster tools shows the speed of downloading pages is faster, and much more consistent
– Google webmaster tools also shows MUCH fewer crawl errors since switching to hostgator.
– automated cron jobs now work how they should: they work on time and they never timeout!
All up, I’m glad I moved away from netfirms, and I’ll never go back again!