New Web Host

I’ve been missing in action on my blog over the past few weeks. We were dealing with Operation Metro Surge, the ICE siege in the Twin Cities metro, which has been all-consuming, but I was also checking out new web hosting services.

My renewal with InMotion Hosting is coming due in April. I’ve been with them since 2018 and have been noticing more downtime for my blog. It would become inaccessible for several minutes randomly and then come back online. I was never sure what was behind it going down, but it was getting annoying.

In searching for a new web host, I considered new platforms altogether, including Ghost.io, Beehiiv, and Patreon. After reviewing these and other platforms, I determined they weren’t quite right or were costly for my small-time blog.

I really wanted to find a platform where I didn’t have to manage all the backend hosting tasks. Because my blog is on a self-installed version of WordPress, there’s a lot of updates and stuff to keep track of, but the platform remains one of the best around for blogging. (I think Ghost.io is up there with it, but you do have to watch the cost.)

Because I wanted help with managing the hosting, I decided to look for a web host that had managed hosting for WordPress. The host that was commonly mentioned as being one of the best at a good price point was Hostinger.

After a lot of reading reviews, hemming and hawing, and asking the Hostinger AI chatbot, Kodee, about various questions about features and how-tos, I made the plunge last night and paid for 2 years of WordPress managed hosting. Hostinger has good introductory deals and the renewal rates after the first year seem to be reasonable. (I hope that’s the case!)

There’s a countdown at the top of the pricing page that was making me fidgety until I read a review that said the timer keeps resetting and the prices don’t really change, which I found to be the case. I don’t like to be pushed to make a quick decision because that leads to mistakes. (Ask me how that worked out for the Chevy Sprint Erik and I bought when we were young and dumb and fell for the car salesman’s hard-sell pitch.)

Once I make a decision, I move fast. I immediately started the process to transfer my site from InMotion to Hostinger. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was. Hostinger does the transfer for you once you’ve given it the information it needs. If you have questions, you can ask Kodee, the chatbot.

Once the transfer has started, you can see how much time it’s going to take. At first, my timer said 55 minutes, so I settled in to wait, working on something else while periodically checking the timer. All looked good, but when it got to around 47 minutes, I got a message that it was going to take 13 hours because resources had to be processed or optimized or some such. However, I could save some of that time if I uploaded a backup file. Knowing I was planning to switch web hosts, I had a backup file at the ready, so I uploaded it. It was over 6 gigabytes, so this took a while. After the upload, my timer said it was going to take 13-14 hours. Ha! So much for using a backup.

I asked Kodee if I could sign out of Hostinger while my site transferred. It answered in the affirmative and said I’d get an email when it was finished.

I woke this morning to an email from Hostinger saying that my site had successfully transferred. The time of the email: 3:17 a.m. I had shut down my computer around 8 p.m., so it only took around 7 hours.

I was so excited that before breakfast I logged in to Hostinger and GoDaddy, my domain name server, to finish the final step – redirecting my domain name to Hostinger’s servers.

Though you can’t tell by looking at my blog, it is now on the new web host. I think it’s loading faster than it did on the old server, which is great.

I still have to enable an email address for the blog through Hostinger. I just checked and I can’t get to the email account through InMotion, which is fine. Other than copies of my blog posts and notices of comments, all that email ever got was spam, so it’s good to start fresh with that.

If you find anything wonky or broken on my site, please let me know.