Choose it carefully! I just finished a large task of moving a blog from one server to another, and there were so many problems that it made me a little ‘nuts’.
The blog itself was a pretty big blog with over 500 posts, and dozens (hundreds?) of images in the files. But the hosting company that I was removing it from did some very dubious things:
- had a large db size that meant normal uploading the mysql db was impossible,
- they wouldn’t let me download the files properly at all and kept truncating our downloads for some reason or other,
- wouldn’t accept Cobian connections properly despite ‘supporting it’,
- provided no unified backup at all of the entire site,
- didn’t even backup the site properly for a year (I suspect),
thus making the whole process difficult extremely so.
What’s worse, they upgraded my account without first checking that that was okay, and expect to deduct the charges from my credit card. Of course, I’ll pay. But the first month only.
And the hosting company that first tried to lock in and overcharge their customers: MediaTemple.
Several other companies I worked with in the past: Hostmonster, Dreamhost, and Bluehost all made it easy to come and go, and have earned my respect for their prompt service, full backup, and ease of use. I will recommend them for these reasons.
Perhaps MediaTemple feels it’s unnecessary to provide backups because of their site stability but other users found reason to fault their service, esp. its reliability. Mmm.
I just feel that if I treated all my customers like that I wouldn’t have any left…!