Moved Site Last Night

My little site had lost it zip in Hostgators shared hosting. It was good for a while but since I've seen a decent growth in membership and activity some of the new car smell, responsiveness and zip had gone away.

I moved to a dedicated server on URLJet. The process was a lot better than expected.

Shut down site at 5PM to start move. Attempt cPanel backup but keep getting error that it's larger then 4GB. Call Hostgater and ask whats up only to be told there is a limit in cPanel of 4GB and I'll need to ftp the files one by one.

Nah, that can't be right, search "4GB limit cpanel" and the very first item is from the cPanel forums about Hostgator folks asking what the deal is. The cPanel people say it's a limit created by Hostgator. Call Hostgator back, point out this little fact and they say yet we do put that limit on the account. Ask for a little help to expand, after 10 min on hold I get a no. Ask to go to level 2, they say no, tell me to move files 1 by 1 via ftp for a backup or since they do a backup once a week on Sunday I can have access to that file, from the previous week. Means I'd lose a week of stuff.

With no joy from Hostgater we proceed to move files the old fashioned way. Took until about 2 am. Make the DNS changes and within an hour or so I'm zipping along with the new server. A few small issues to fix and in bed at 5AM with a fully functional site again.

The site is decidedly zippier now, sorta like driving a MINI on a crisp day when the air is cool and the engine just purrs.

Plus being on a dedicated server I have full access to back end to really screw stuff up now!

 

I moved from HG to Servint. Servint did a 'managed migration' and moved everything over. The person doing the move had trouble (one of the advantages to being on the phone while it was being done) and said that there was a 4 GB limit using the method he was using. I did not realize it was a HG limit.

In our case many of the files were not needed, or wanted, so I deleted them.

HG, from my perspective, has been going downhill fast in many areas. Specifically the top level decisions being made, tech support, and customer support. It took 5 or 8 emails just to get them to take the credit card off the account and let the account expire. The first replied "go here to delete account", then a variety of other confusing options. I'm still not convinced that they will not bill me, so I will manually close it 2 months before the account becomes due. Since they automatically billed me for a year, and have 1/2 a year left, it would be nice to keep that in case a project comes up.

It was my hope to send my sites backups to HG, but apparently that is against the TOS even though they would not consume much disc space.

 

I'm quite interested in the decision process you used to go to a dedicated, at URLjet. What costs are for it, processor, specs, etc.

The only thing URLjet lists for a dedicated is a submit quote option.

Do they run their own servers directly or do they use another company for their top level tech support?

That is one of the things that drove me nuts with HG. When the semi-tough questions came up they would need to email The Planet for answers. Occasionally they would tell me to email The Planet, at least I believe that is where my emails went.

 

We had moved our local MINI club to URLJet from DreamHost about 6 months ago. The move went well and the support has been great. For our local club where there is a new tech officer every year that usually has no idea of whats going on the support that URLJet offers has bee great. I'm not always around to answer the question our tech guy has and I try to stay out of that area as it's not my job.

So that was part of the process

My day job is with Drive Thru Online and we are URLJet preferred providers for vB mods. That fit in the decision process.

I do have a consulting contract with URLJet as well.

So it's all a little incestuous.

What I have is the following:

GENUINE INTEL DUAL CORE ATOM 330
1MB L2 Cache 1.6Ghz Dual-Core
2GB DDR2 RAM
2x80GB 3.0Gbps SATA Drives
2,000 GB Premium Bandwidth
R1 File CDP Agent - Hourly Backup
LiteSpeed

Everyone has different needs, I needed a lot of bandwidth as I host some rather large files (750MB+) for them benefit of the site members. Makes it hard to compare pricing when going out of the standard packages.

Being the company is based in OK and the data center is in KS I'm going to figure like many others they buy space at data center. Have not had any particularly thorny issues that needed to be escalated so I don't know the depth of their knowledge.

One advantage I had with HostGator is that The Planet is based here in Dallas and a few of the employees are members of our local MINI Club. When there was an outage and I could not get through to HG I could always call one of the people I know and get the straight dope. However, just looking at the support experience I had with them last night with the 4GB limit and the time it took to get any kind of answers from them really soured me on HG support. Dare I say it but I think it was offshore support due to the accents, time delay between questions and answers and the accents of the support personnel. URLJet is still small and has a small staff, it's not hard at all to get to know the people you are working with and that means a lot to me.

 

Cool, Love the last line of what you said lol.

 

Appreciate the complete and well thought out reply.

I am at this time delighted with ServInt, but would have gone with URLjet if there were only a 50% premium to go with them. But they are 100% more expensive, with 5x less bandwith, 50% less ram, and 3x less disc space than what we got.

Although the lightspeed option is tempting.



While I am delighted with ServInt I would like to maintain a list of viable alternatives in case 'something' changes. I was happy with HG, and then at some point, much less happy. I even traded emails with one of the higher ups expressing my concerns while at the same time thanking them for the time we were with them, mostly indicating that we had grown too large. I also mentioned in passing that we were going to use the account to store out backups (3gb?). His reply was that we were not allowed to use the account for storing files, and to cease immediately, the wording seemed unnecessarily strong.

My biggest beef with HG, like some other tech support providers, is the several layers/tier of support people to go through. Then when the top people at HG could no longer help, I needed to start all over by emailing The Planet tech people.

 

LiteSpeed is a fantastic (and interchangeable) alternative to Apache. It not only improves overall performance and rendering speed, but it places less of a load on the server's hardware and provides an all-around pleasant experience for both the front-end and back-end users.

Congratulations on the successful move, gnatster!