That I’m even posting this demonstrates the move from Hostgator to KnownHost has completed. It’s possible some things broke in the move. So if you notice anything odd, please notify us. Don’t assume we’re aware of them.
Some notes about Hostgator, KnownHost, and our experience, for those who care:
- Hostgator is a fine place for a small blog and, perhaps, a very big one. It is not a fine place for a medium sized blog. They have very cheap shared server plans (we’re talking tens of dollars per year) and quite expensive dedicated server plans (we’re talking well over $1,000 per year), but nothing in between.
- Until the last month or so, I found Hostgator’s technical support to be outstanding. The last month they really failed us. Instead of suggesting we need to buy more resources to manage our demands on the server, they blocked Google from indexing the blog without explaining clearly to us they were doing that. Needless to say, this was a lousy way to treat a customer. Moreover, we had done everything they had asked us to do to optimize our blog. The fundamental problem was that we had too much traffic. That’s a success! They turned it into a load of unnecessary work.
- So, after bending over backwards to satisfy Hostgator, we started the process of getting Google to re-index the site, which takes considerable calendar time. By one measure it’s about 75% back to normal now.
- Meanwhile, since Hostgator has no good options for a blog of our size, we found something more suitable at KnownHost. The nice thing about KH is that their shared server packages scale. If we need to buy some more resources we can, not for thousands, but for far less. I’m hopeful they will work with us as we grow, not treat it is as a nuisance to be stifled.
- Because Aaron and I are not super expert at all the technical details that underlie a blog like ours, we had some pretty comical interactions with KH’s techies as they tried to help us move the blog. It was a bit of shared decision making gone awry. We kept pushing the technical questions back to them (“What do you think is best? What do you recommend? Just try it and we’ll fix whatever breaks.”) and they kept pushing the liability back on us (“We can’t guarantee everything will be compatible. Have your developer check all the code.” Hah! Very funny.)
- My advice to small blogs: Hostgator is a fine way to start and could satisfy you for years or forever. However, if and when they start bothering you about your plug-ins, go elsewhere.
