How many times have you changed hosts?

[basement]

I've been on several hosts since i started in adult, and the moves have
been eventful. one host unplugged my server 14 days early, taking my sites
offline. another lost some of our content. and the last move was easy,
but the old host helped set up our apache, and they did it wrong. i hope i
don't have to change hosts again for a long time!

[AusCoding Allan]

Once - I got to chilihost and never want to move again - Luke's fantastic.

Cheers,

Allan

[basschick]

we've moved six times - hopefully we'll be staying where we are for a long time...

[Bec]

Once - to Chilihost - and haven't had a spec of trouble since.

[MiamiB]

Our host of 7 years pulled the plug (did give us 3 months notice thank god) and then people here turned us on to Chilihost. Moved and hope to be with Luke and his fine company for many many years to come!

He made the transition smooth and painless!

Lee

[Dzinerbear]

I've been in business over two years and I've moved once, and that was to Chili Host. I had cheap web hosting to start things off, and they really were fine. But as I my sites became more complex, I needed a host that could help with my questions and problems. My old host just didn't give me the kind of support I get from CH. Luke's been a dream.

dzinerbear

[Chilihost]

I've been on several hosts since i started in adult, and the moves have been eventful. one host unplugged my server 14 days early, taking my sites offline. another lost some of our content. and the last move was easy, but the old host helped set up our apache, and they did it wrong. i hope i don't have to change hosts again for a long time!

Ya know this was one of the main reasons I started chilihost back in 2001, I just could not find a decent web host that offered reasonable prices and any real support. Having done I.T. support since 1991, I know how important support is, especially when you are running your business depending on it. IMHO there is no excuse for anything less.

Good luck with your new hosting company, basement. Hopefully it will be your last move for a while!

cheers,
Luke

[basement]

We have been generally pretty happy and trouble free for couple of years now. Keeping my fingers crossed.

[BDBionic]

It's amazing how much of a role your host can play in your business.

I mean it really is like the relationship you'd have with a brick and mortar business and the landlord of the building your store's in. If they let the facility they own go to shit - power keeps going out, water goes out, parking is horribly inadequate, building appears rundown, so on so forth - they could kill your ability to run your business, regardless of how good whatever it is you're selling and a salesman you are.

We purchased a website that we knew had fantastic content and a real ability to convert and make members wonderfully happy, but were stuck with the old owners old host for awhile immediately after taking over this site. And what a nightmare that was. Servers going down constantly. A nightmarish setup and layout of the servers. Inability to get tech support when needed. And the effect that had on our ability to make money with this site was very real, regardless of how wonderful the content was. We'd lose joins because the servers would go down or need rebooting and we couldn't contact the host to do that (and they didn't provide us the means to do it ourselves with a simple admin page); the server would fill up cuz this host would put all kinds of other sites and shit on servers that were supposed to be ours and ours alone; password files would mysteriously disappear; entire files and directories would disappear; anytime the host tried to take initiative, he'd just screw things up more (for example, moving things to newer boxes he'd purchased, but the files he'd move were old backups he'd made rather than what was actually live on the site... whiping out days and sometimes weeks of changes and updates); one of the servers he apparently kept in his garage at home; there was no security and the majority of the bandwidth we'd go through was from unauthorized users.

A true nightmare that had real effects on our bottom line - conversion, retention, eagerness of affiliates to continue promoting, customer satisfaction, word of mouth, list goes on and on.

Thankfully it was only for a short while, as we set up new hosting arrangements with Cavecreek and moved the site to them early - figuring we'd rather pay the old host (that we were stuck in a contract with as part of the site purchase) and the new host at the same time, so long as the live site was with the new host.

And Cavecreek's been great. It's so nice to just be able to pick up the phone at any time of day (because lord knows i'm probably up and working at any time of day) when there's a tech issue and know they'll get on it. It's so nice as a site owner to not have to worry about all of those technical issues and trust in your host to keep tabs on and address them. It's so nice when your host knows what they're doing and cares about keepin ya happy and keepin your site workin. Even when they've not been able to fix occasional issues right away, to at least know they're working on it, care about it, and are making a real and genuine effort to get it resolved is valuable consolation.

Our sales and rebills have gone up as the site operates smoothly and is online 100% of the time, and I sleep better at night.

[Greg Gaskell]

At least 5 times and now i run my paysite front ends on refelcted.net and my members area and hosted galleries over at alphared.com

Might move from alphared to xxxwebhosting as i have been with phil from there before and he rocks.

Paysite from ends will stay at reflected tho for sure

[twan]

Only once here. I had a virtual account with oxeo, but the server was unreliable. So i moved to ev1servers and got my own unmanaged dedicated server, and i'm still very happy with it.

[Dzinerbear]

Yes, a badly run host can be a nightmare. I used to do corporate web design before coming to MANcheck fulltime. And I got one of my corporate clients to sign up with the host I was using at the time (which was NOT Chili Host). My client sold promotional products and would put anything you wanted on a mug or a t-shirt.

Well, one day I get a call from the client. They're shrieking, they're horrified. Their website has been hacked and there is an naked Indian woman with cum all over her face in place of their website. I called the host, they fixed it, it hadn't been hacked at all. A buddy of mine told me that the server was probably just set up incorrectly so that it would default to the first site on the server, and that just happened to be Indian porn.

Cheers
dzinerbear

[Daymare]

I've been with a bunch over a years, including flashhost ($8/gb back in the day), candid, entangledweb. Then I moved to swiftwill and haven't moved. They rock and tech support is great.