Moved Again, Hopefully For Last Time
August 29, 2014 by Dave Haynes
When I started this blog back in early 2006 I was hosted by WordPress, for nothing.
But that didn’t even allow my own URL, so I eventually found some Russian guy in Queens who did hosting for $3/month, and my own domain was born.
That actually worked pretty well, but if the servers went down and the Russian guy was out getting Cheetos, I was pooched. The blog had grown to a point that I needed to spend more than $36 a year on it.
So began my journey, from squatting on an industry friend’s server (better, but his company wasn’t in the hosting business) to a succession of increasingly pricy professional hosts and supporting services.
I thought I was making a great call about 18 months ago when I signed on with a company that was focused just on WordPress hosting, did dedicated scanning and backed up my site every which way. I paid what, for a single blog site, was a pretty healthy peace of mind premium.
And that company turned out to be horrible. In the last few weeks the site has been offline or sputtering countless times.
So, this week, I moved again. This time I had it all done using a managed service – a term familiar to the digital signage crowd. Get experts to do the heavy lifting and deal with the weird shit that happens. The migration almost all happened without disruption and my previous hosts are just a bad memory.
The site is now faster. The core theme is upgraded. Admin is snappy. I have seemingly 24/7 tech support, and I think my overall cost – even with adding new services like a CDN and image optimization, is less. Yay.
Hopefully, the recent days of hitting Sixteen:Nine and being delighted to see it is ACTUALLY up and snappy, are over.
Please.
The site works much more better on mobile and desktop. Nicely done.
P.S.
You should never host anything for $3/month.