How Often Do You Change Hosting

[Nomad]

I bought Namecheap hosting package in 2015 and I have been with Namecheap since then. I have never switched hosting. How many hosting companies have you changed? How often do you change your hosting service? When you changed your hosting service, why did you change it? I am thinking about changing Namecheap because I am looking for a hosting company that offers support for Let's Encrypt.

 

[Arantor]

My very first host in 2000 was a hosted service that only did static pages, and I started out with a wholly static site back in the day. After a while I figured I didn't want to manage it myself and I ended up with a host that did what we would now call Classic ASP (and I was working in Visual Basic, so it made sense). But they wanted too much money for adding a custom domain, so I went and found a host that would give me a domain name and something with a database for a reasonable amount of money, and that was in 2003. I was still with that firm until 2005 when they managed to screw up one of my sites and cost me the domain with it.

After that I sat back and figured I'd experiment with something else... got me my first VPS with Linode in early 2006. Ran a lot of crazy stuff on that VPS. I mostly just stayed on that VPS until 2017 when I started playing around with AWS through work since we were an AWS partner. Then in 2021 I found Cloudways which gave me much of the power I had with Linode but with less of the hassle of management and finally migrated off Linode.

I did have stuff hosted on smaller hosting companies in the interim, but they're no longer operating, e.g. I was with a place called Gray Web Host from 2014 until 2021 when its owner moved on. Mostly because the guy was a friend and I wanted simple-no-fuss hosting which isn't always easy on a VPS.

The general pattern is that when I find it too expensive, too inconvenient or too limiting, I'll look around - but I tend to value loyalty and convenience more than price. That said, I was mostly happy with Linode until the last couple of years, basically their acquisition by Akamai did them no favours as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Shortie]

When I first started creating forums and websites using paid hosting, I started out with GoDaddy. After I had a bad experience with them, I went to a hosting company that my dad recommended which he had been using for a while called BigWetFish Hosting. I was with them for around 3 - 4 years without any issues until I started getting a lot of downtimes suddenly. I was then told that I was on shared hosting and sharing with around 200 - 300 people which was causing me to have the outages I was. The person who told me this then offered me a deal price on the hosting he had which meant I was no longer sharing and up time would have been so much better. I was with them from 2012 - 2017 when the hosting I was with made a huge price increase and I was no longer able to afford it and had to make the tough decision to close my forum in February 2017.

I have since opened my forum again with a fresh start unfortunately after losing my backup when my laptop hard drive died on me. Now I am with HawkHost for my hosting as my other half is hosting me on his hosting plan and he has been with them for years.

All in all, I have changed hosting 4 times since starting out.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I started out with Hostgator, I didn't have too many issues with them but they are one of the EIG owned hosts and EIG is known to have a bad rep when it comes to hosting. I've tried using Dreamhost, but had a bad experience with Dreamhost. Downtime was terrible, and support wasn't the best so I made the switch to Knownhost. They were a bit expensive however, so eventually whenever I got back into owning a forum last year I went with ionos. These were all different forums that were hosted on different hosts. The only forum I've ever had that was on multiple different hosts was my old Mighty No. 9 forum. It started on Prophpbb, then Hostgator, then IPS cloud, and finally Jcink before I ultimately closed it.

 

[Tracy]

Usually when a find a better package price on what I need (actually want) for my sites.
I do regular off-site backups, and since I use a VPS and CentMin Mod, spinning a new site up is only a matter of about an hour or so of time.

Right now, I'm on a 4vCPU/8GB RAM/160GB SSD storage VPS from Hetzner (shared CPU's) and am paying a whopping (approximate) $17 a month for it. I was almost paying that to Digital Ocean for 1/2 the ability.
Hetzner has some good deals on dedicated servers... but they still haven't gotten any in the US, so that option is out of consideration from them for me.
If I decide to go back to a dedicated (which will be set up to spin up VPS instances using ProxMox or SolusVM) I'll probably end back up with a US based provider.

 

[Kale]

When I had a forum on my own hosting I'd never change to another host. I would stick with my host until I decided to close the forum and/or website.

 

[Arantor]

Hetzner has some good deals on dedicated servers... but they still haven't gotten any in the US, so that option is out of consideration from them for me.

Whereas for me this is a legal requirement to not host on US based servers, so... but seeing that they're based in Germany this is not particularly surprising to me.

 

[Dan The Man]

Rarely. Once I find a reliable and affordable provider, I stick put. Most hosting companies are the very similar and the offline distributions to the community are often not worth it. Again, reliability is the most important factor, followed by affordability. Customer service is important too but rarely do I require hands on support.

 

[Tracy]

Whereas for me this is a legal requirement to not host on US based servers, so... but seeing that they're based in Germany this is not particularly surprising to me.

The thing is... they DO offer VPS's in two different U.S. locations... so dedicated should not be any different. The "enforcement" process is the same whether the site is on a virtual instance or dedicated hardware.

 

[Acans]

So far I've only changed host when they closed down. From 2009 until 2012 I was with a friends company. From 2012 to 2021 I was with Gray Web Host and now with NameCheap.

I'm expending not to have to move again for sometime but I guess you never know what's down the road.

 

[Tracy]

Let me just say...even though my site size would be served well enough by shared hosting providers... I'll go to one of them when hell freezes over.
Let us just say I like having a little more control over what I can do on my site than what a shared hosting provider offers.... and with CentMin (and other panels, some of which are paid solutions) available... it should not be THAT hard for someone to move from shared hosting to VPS and having a similar experience.
The only big "gotcha" is YOU are now responsible for the core operating system. Seeing how I've been messing with Linux for over 3 decades, for me that's not a big issue.

 

[Ummagumma]

Very rarely once I am happy with the setup and who does what. For instance, one of my sites has been hosted with the same company for nigh on 10 years.
If it's not broken and all that.

 

[MrChris]

I bought Namecheap hosting package in 2015 and I have been with Namecheap since then. I have never switched hosting. How many hosting companies have you changed? How often do you change your hosting service? When you changed your hosting service, why did you change it? I am thinking about changing Namecheap because I am looking for a hosting company that offers support for Let's Encrypt.

I have switched to 3-4 different providers every 6-12 months sometimes longer. I just to try a different provider out and be able to put a review about them on my site, but at this point, I'm feeling pretty comfortable where I'm at.