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-dive 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.

Wow!

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!

And goodbye to Netfirms (and good riddance!)