I wish it was photoshoped!

Well, the success over at Hostgator wasn’t long. I took a decision to move host again due to recent irritating slowness when loading the page. I investigated it a bit and then decided that a host in US really isn’t working for me, so raised my budget and started looking for a host in Europe.

My first attempt was to find a decent shared host in Europe within the $10-15 market. There are a lot of companies offering hosting in this pricerange, but all seemed to run on overloaded servers and/or have very restricted TOS/AUPs. As I was browsing around I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my hosting and what requirements I had (being a former Dreamhost customer has really raised my standards on a shared host):

• SSH access
• Located in Europe
• Been around for 2-3 years atleast and wellknown on WHT
• Fast and good support
• Acceptable AUPs and TOS
• 300GB Bandwidth
• 5GB diskspace

As I couldn’t find any good offers I liked, I started browsing the VPS offers. Some of the offers I found here was some times cheaper and had a lot more to offer than a shared host. Thoughts of my own SVN, backgroundprocesses and even JAVA development would be possible. So I quickly moved over to look for a good VPS host instead and found a new home over at ConnectSwitch.

Setup was quick (within minutes), however my account didn’t get it’s own IP assigned to it. After about 24 hours and some support tickets, I got a new account with IPs assigned to it. Spent some time to configure it up and compared it to other hosts and found it was kinda slow (I think it was the CPU) but okay for my uses. However then the securitybugs with HyperVM was announced, they turned off the controlpanel (which is good as I prefer to keep my hosting secure). They also promised to migrate everyone to Parallells Virtuozzo within 48 hours. This is a great service, but it feels its more talk as I’m currently waiting for an update and it’s been almost 5 days now without any information regarding the move.

So I started my search again, found a new provider I looked at before called Future Hosting. They offer great service and good specs on their systems, however their prices was WAY higher than I was planning on spending. However with a recent special who gives 40% off they came pretty much close to my pricerange, so I made the decision to give them a try. Server is running great, good support and based in UK. I know it’s to early to say, but it currently feels like a good home for my sites and my development ideas.

Migration has started, lets see how it turns out when running live..

Now moved my site from Dreamhost to Hostgator. Dreamhost been more than stable and very nice experience. I really like what they got going with all the features they adding and also their attitude to life and their business. Hopefully they’ll open up something closer to Europe and I will become a customer again, because the load speed is really what motivated the move.

As the title says the site is now hosted in Hostgator. Even thou its still located in the U.S. I get a lot better speeds than from Dreamhost. Still have my 45 day money back guarantee if anything feels wrong.

And we can all start counting down until next christmas.. Yay!

To all who didn’t get our christmascard (would be surprised if you did as I didn’t send any), Merry Christmas and a Happy new year!