I made the move, I took the plunge. I trusted that my blog wouldn’t break, and thankfully *touch wood* it’s still in one piece. I’ve managed to survive migrating from one host to another and have lived to tell the tale. For someone who doesn’t do the whole coding thing and found the backend part of moving to self hosting painful (at best), nobody is more shocked than me. So, why did I move? And why did I move to GoDaddy?
I’ve recently noticed an increase in traffic on this blog, which is really nice to see. I’ve moved from having around 2000 page views a month to closer to 8000 in about three months. Part of this was down to the types of posts I’ve been writing. Some of them have been heavy with images and gifs. I started receiving emails from my old host saying I was hitting the traffic limit on my blog and would need to upgrade hosting. So, I did. I logged into the hosting website and signed up to the next level.
That was fine, until two weeks later I started getting more emails from them saying my traffic storage was running out AGAIN. Now, the limit had DOUBLED in two weeks, in the two years beforehand I had never ever had an issue. It’s not like something went completely viral in the grander scheme of things (though, to me, when something gets 1000+ views, it feels like going viral).
Then I logged in yesterday and saw that I had gone over the limit for bandwidth for traffic. When I looked at increasing the package again, to add another 200GB, I saw that they had charged me. Without telling me, I had managed to rack up €110 of charges for overuse. To say I was shocked/annoyed would be an understatement. In no way does my blog earn enough to justify that level of costs for two weeks of hosting.
I got in touch with them, they looked into it and pinpointed one post in particular as the issue, the gif-filled Grey’s Anatomy Guide To Parenting a Toddler. They (thankfully) agreed to waive the overuse charge as I hadn’t been made aware that I was being charged. I hid that post from public to save any further data, and looked into other options for hosting images. After a few hours of googling, trying out Dropbox, Google Drive and others, I felt like throwing the laptop at a wall. So, I got looking at other hosting packages to see what was available.
GoDaddy had been mentioned to me as a good option when I had spoken to other bloggers about my plight. I decided to go with them for a number of different reasons, and am really happy that I have. Here’s Why:
Customer Service
This was the biggest part of the night and day difference between my old provider and GoDaddy. Previous correspondance with them had consisted of a lot of chat messages that came to “Ah right, well you have to email that info to this address and they’ll deal with it”, even for the simplest of requests.
The chat advisor on the GoDaddy website was friendly and helpful and able to answer all of my questions. Furthermore, we actually got cut off when I was looking for a pin code, and when I got through to another advisor, they were more than happy to patch me through to the previous guy. That meant I didn’t have to waste time explaining my situation or what we had done so far. As someone who works in customer care, I tend to avoid lengthening these conversations any more than I really have to, so that was definitely a bonus for me.
Ease of Use
I had expected the move over to a new hosting platform to be full of chaos and 404 errors. No such thing. It was really a step by step, one click fix, and they did the rest. I’d already been using them for my domain for the last year. I was a WordPress based blog, and I didn’t need to know the C-panel stuff which I haven’t a clue about. I was directed to a form to log in to my WordPress account, hit go and let the website do it’s thing.
Because this blog is three and a half years old, it took a few hours to port everything over. I let it run overnight. When I woke up, there was an email in my inbox with a temporary url. Using this, I could check that everything was working fine. It was. Mini-happy dance complete, I was then able to change over my domain to the one I wanted to use. And voila, it was complete with absolutely NO downtime, no coding, no stress.
No Bandwidth Limits
This is the kicker, the reason for changing. I spent lots of time yesterday evening trying to figure out how to move all my pictures from my blog to another hosting place for images. I removed all of the gifs from that post, for starters, and attempted to get them back in from other sources. No joy. I installed plugins, and went to the third page of google to skim through forum posts that had no use. There’s a whole lot of outdated information out there, and I tried a lot of it.
So, finding an alternative hosting platform that said storing everything on the blog, like I had been doing it, solved a whole lot of problems. There is a user limit per month of 100,000 visitors – which can be increased for extra cost if I were to ever get that traffic. If I ever hit that issue, something tells me I’ll be okay with paying a few euro extra a month to manage it.
So, there it is. I did technical stuff (or rather, it did it by itself and I can take the credit) and lived to tell the tale. It can be done! I’ve cancelled my previous hosting subscription and am getting a refund for the unused portion of the month. Now, for less money, I’m getting so much more. Happy ending!
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This isn’t an ad, nor have I been asked to write anything about the process by GoDaddy. I’m merely very happy at how simple and easy it was to switch!
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