I came on-line in 1996 and constructed WillieCrawford.com in 1997. I went with a
full-service host recommended by a trusted friend. They were EXCELLENT! I
could send a question to tech support, and I usually had a response in minutes! They had a staff of full-time, tech support personnel, based around the world, so someone was ALWAYS on-call. I loved it. I paid a premium price for this
service but it was worth it since I got premium service.
Then this company grew and made a few changes. Then one week ALL email from the servers my site was hosted on was blocked for having relays that were vulnerable to spammers. ORBS (an organization that combs the internet looking for open relays) put them on "the black list" and my email along with that of countless others was blocked.
I got NO EMAIL from my customers for over a week. But I stuck with this company because their prices were "reasonable" for the service provided, and I believed in them. After about 2 weeks they fixed this problem but the experience left me wondering!
Then my host grew some more, merged several times, and became a totally different creature. Their customer service went down the toilet, but their prices stay sky-high and some even increased. Then they shifted many functions such as billing to obscure locations, started mailing you statements that were impossible to understand and became a total bureaucracy.
At that point I began SERIOUSLY think about moving. I wasn't getting premium service and saw no sense in paying nearly $100 for hosting just 1 domain when I could get the same features and server space for 1/4th the price elsewhere.
However, I had about 20 cgi scripts running on my site and was making regular sales. I feared moving and interrupting my business. In the back of my mind, something terrible could happen if I dared move my site.
So I mulled it over, and put it off, and watched the service continue to deteriorate
and watched prices continue to increase. At the same time, I continued to watch other hosts offer bigger and better packages at a fraction of the cost. I even built numerous site on one of these other hosts. And those sites worked flawlessly.
Since I wasn't paying a premium price at the other host, I did have to sometimes
wait a little while for them to respond to my email questions, but I don't
think I ever waited longer than an hour or two. And I did have a phone number I could have used in an emergency. The new, lower-priced host actually had better customer service and a better response time than my "premium" hosts.
Then one day THEY REALLY TICKED ME OFF! I emailed tech support at my high-priced host about an email problem I was
having. The tech who was on-duty emailed back and said that they preferred that
I use my ISP provided email to send and receive email.
I DIDN'T WANT to use my ISP's email address. I wanted my business email to reflect my business email address in every part of the header. That's when I finally got up the nerve to move.
I asked around and was told that it was fairly easy. I was warned that I might need to reconfigure some scripts. I was advised that there was several ways of doing this. They were each explained to me.
I was warned that it might take a day or two for my DNS server to properly
resolve to the new location.
And I was told to go ahead and do it.
To make a long story short, the transfer went off without any major problems.
I moved my three busiest sites all to the same new host and in the process got much better service, and saved over $120 per month.
Realizing that many of you are dealing with the same problems that I did, I convinced my friends Steve MacLellan And Frank Deardurff III to join me on a tele-seminar where we explained the entire process to you.
Steve and Frank are absolute web wizards whom I have turned to many times for
web site related problems or services. They both really know their stuff.
Sincerely,
Willie Crawford
williecrawford.com |