The Hosting Merry-go-round
Back in February, I wrote a blog post entitled “The Blog and Site Are Back (or, Don’t Change Hosting Providers If You Don’t Have To“. Since then, I’ve changed hosting providers for sqlha.com another two times. Why all the change? Well, a lot of it has to do with this blog.
Let’s start with the original hosting provider. That blog post tells the high level tale of woe which I will not rehash. That opened the door for Hosting Company #2. They in many ways were just as bad as the original one – I couldn’t get the blog working right to save my life. They were hard to get support from and after about a month of trying to troubleshoot, I gave up. That was unfortunate as I really liked their e-mail solution and they were flexible with domains and databases (relatively speaking).
Hosting Company #3 came into play early in April at my frustration with #2. By all accounts, everything has worked, but the problem is their flexibility with domains and what I got for my money. Quite frankly, I’m not a high volume user, but demanding in other ways, and by just hosting sqlha.com with them, it was more expensive. (I also do a couple of other domains for personal stuff, too, and I prefer to have it all under one house so-to-speak.)
Enter Hosting Company #4 for sqlha.com, who winds up being the hosting provider for one of my long running websites. I was going to possibly move that one, but their new hosting plans are flexible, pretty cheap, and solid. I know what I’m getting from them as my one domain has been there for ten years. They’re always responsive and helpful. They fully support BlogEngine.NET and I spent quite a bit of time porting over my old posts to here. This should be the final move. Now all of my domains are under one roof.
All of this was going on behind the scenes between a few business trips, a lot of work (including writing a 70+ page whitepaper), and so on. Anyone who thinks those of us running our own businesses and being self employed is easy, think again! If I had lots of minions I’d have tasked all of this domain business to other folks to get finished. Instead, I’m head chef, sous chef, dishwasher, and waiter all rolled up in one.