webrampage

Yeah everyone hates the downtime you have when you are switching web hosts. Its like visitors don’t have a clue about what’s going on and they leave. And it really sucks if you’re trying to sell something. Maybe you just turned away a potential client or customer.

First of all, never move your site at the last minute. For example, if your hosting is expiring in 4 weeks then start finding a web host. After you found a good hosting deal. Plan on moving your site 2-3 weeks before your hosting expires.

Time to move

Okay so its time to move your site. Download all the files and/or databases from your old host to your computer. And then upload them to your new host. Make sure that everything is running. If needed bring in a team of highly trained monkeys to do some testing.

Don’t delete the files

Wait! Don’t delete the files and databases on your old host yet. Keep them just the way it is. Okay now go change the nameserver to the new host’s. It should take about 3-10 minutes for the DNS changes to take place.

How to know if you moved?

So how do you know if you have moved successfully? Hard to tell since everything went by smooth. No one knows that you moved. No crazy downtimes! Well if you want to make sure that you moved successfully then put a little HTML fill called “test.html” (and write something like “server move test”) on your new host. And then point to www.mysite.com/test.html. If you can see the file then congrats!

See how easy it is? Now say good bye to downtimes while moving hosts!

Oh and keep the files and databases on your old host for about a week or so. Just incase something goes wrong on the new host, you can then just change the nameserver and no one will notice. Smart, huh?

PowWeb‘s support sucks. I think even free web hosts have better support than PowWeb. Their support is a joke. A complete waste of time. I used their service and I can tell you how it is.

Their first level support is full of dumb people. Like I have to tell them what to do. They don’t know what “root” is. I mean like they don’t know where root is. I had to tell them where it was. I thought they were supposed to tell customers about stuff like that. Well its the opposite at PowWeb.

And their second support is just great! I was being sarcastic. They take forever to do the simplest things. They probably have like 10 people working on the second level to serve like a couple of thousand customers (5000 maybe). I think I know how to perfectly describe them. Monkeys which have been trained. I’m pretty sure trained monkeys could even do a better job than them.

Now their plan is great. 1.5 tb of space, 15 tb of bandwidth and 75 MySQL databases for $5.77/month. But their support really sucks. I don’t care how good the deal is. You need to provide customers with the kind of support they deserve.

So, I don’t recommend you using PowWeb unless you know that you’ll never need to contact support. And that’s like impossible, at least when you’re using PowWeb. By the way, they don’t use cPanel. They made their own ghetto control panel. That’s a nice way to save money.

There are few things that you should be aware of when you choose your web host. Whether its a free hosting service or a paid one. I think these are pretty important if you care about your site.

Paid Hosting

• See if your host is reliable. Ask a few people about their service. Or you could just Google the web host’s name with a few keyword and see what comes up. You’ll probably get a few blog posts and/or forum discussions about them.
• Keep in mind that you get what you paid for. If your host is giving you a great deal like 50gb of space, 100gb of bandwidth, etc and the price tag is only $3 per month. Then I think your host is overselling (its when you give people more than you can since most customers don’t use all of their resources). And they might not have a good service since their server is packed tight with a lot more users than it can handle. And if a host doesn’t make money how will they stay in business. That means that they might go out of business like a lot of web hosts. So, don’t always go with the cheapest. Look for the one which offers a reliable service at a reasonable price.
• Check if they are a reseller. A reseller is someone or a host which buys a reseller plan from another host and they use the other host’s resources to provide you a web hosting service. Pretty much like pretending to be a web host. Now they might give you a good deal but their service might not be reliable. And anyone with a few extra bucks to spare per month can be a reseller. And so they might not have a good support.
• See how long they have been in the business. So that the next morning you don’t wake up to find your site down and your web host gone. No refund or anything. They probably ran out of business or they ran away with your money.
• Check their Terms and Conditions of Service and their policies and shit. If they are overselling and you use up like 60-90% of your resources then they might close your account and give you some bullshit reason. Why? Because if you use all of your resources then there will be a shortage on the server. Since they rely on resources that have not been used by other customers.
• Good support? Check for that. You need a good reliable support. And before you actually buy one of their hosting plans go chat with the sales rep (if they have a live chat) or email them and see if they are nice and if they type in a formal way or like “ok. we;ll do dat. dont worry about that.” or like “Yes. Sure we can do that for you.”

Free Hosting

• See if they have support. Like even a support forum where the users pretty much help each other.
• I know a guy who had a pretty successful forum and the web host downloaded his database and forum files. And made a clone of his forum and redirected the traffic from the real forum to the clone. And he could have sold the forum database to people (yeah there are people who buy them).
• Reliable? Check for that. You don’t want your site to be down all the time.

So, that’s it for now. I might later make a list of good hosting deals. Both free and paid.