For the first time in about 8 years, you’re reading this post on a new webhost. I left it pretty late to choose, in fact today was the expiration of my old hosting, but I’m very glad I did.
For the last best part of a decade, I’ve bought hosting through a company called Web-Mania. They were always cheap and pretty good value for money for what you got in terms of space and bandwidth. Unfortunately over the last year or so the level of service just plummeted. Speeds got really slow, uptime was ropey with sites down for up to a day at a time, and customer service non-existent. Phones not answered, the once-useful live chat gone, and I’ve NEVER had a reply from an email. Then in the last couple of years they folded and were taken-over/bought out by a company called Yorhost, where absolutely nothing changed except for some new graphics on their site (it and when it was available).
Anyway, I got fed up with it, and having moved our club sites to new hosting, decided to follow suit with this place. So now I’m hosted on tsohost.co.uk and it’s a breath of fresh air. The backend is FAR more comprehensive, utilising the de-facto Cpanel for service maintenance. I was able to create a new database, new user and new FTP account in a few minutes and then import the SQL dump from the old hosting so I didn’t have to start this place from scratch. A quick re-upload of the WordPress install, a much needed update to the core (which I couldn’t do at the old place thanks to their out-dated services), ~21,000 spam comments deleted and everything’s feeling much fresher.
I almost forgot to re-do my email redirection, but luckily found that part of my brain working before I’d much of a chance to miss much email.
So, if you’re with Yorhost/Web-Mania and fed up with it, you can do a lot worse than heading over to tsohost.co.uk. Cheaper, much better service, and much more for your money. Obviously this is just my opinion, YMMV, but that’s what this place is for; my opinions. And no, I’m not on commission/referral ;).