Convivial host

1 May 2008 - 17:25

We have just opened a hosting account with Hawk Host, and will be migrating the sites that we currently have hosted at iVhosting.com over to it during the couple of months that our subscription with the old host has left to run. Those sites include The PC Guru and our URL shortener site xaddr.com, as well as my personal ham radio hobby site g4ilo.com, but not tech-pro.net itself.

Picking a good web host is one of the toughest things to do, as when everything is going well there is nothing to choose between any of the hosting packages that are comparable in specification except the price. When I moved to iVhosting nearly 3 years ago I was very pleased with the speed and reliability of the servers, especially for the price of $100 a year. When I moved tech-pro.net from there to "business class" web hosting it was more because I felt uncomfortable running a site that generated the major part of our income on a $100 a year host than because there had been anything wrong with the service iVhosting provided.

Since then, their server has been hacked once (to my knowledge), I have frequently had to alert them that the server hard drive is full after being unable to upload anything, and the cPanel often runs as slow as treacle. They have locked down what you can do so much that I cannot even exec commands from PHP to do things like automate MySQL backups, and they wanted $50 for a dedicated IP address so my sites share one IP with about 1,600 other domains. So, hassle though it is, the time has come to change.

I chose Hawk Host after seeing some positive feedback on it in the WebHostingTalk forums. I visited their own forum, liked the positive comments from users I saw there, and the quality of the answers to user questions, and decided to go for it. My own pre-sales questions were answered promptly and helpfully. Time alone will tell how this works out, but I'm confident enough about Hawk Host to sign up for a year.