Some of you will have caught the Tweet I sent on Friday asking for suggestions of new hosting companies for TheEquityKicker. Regular readers will know I think speed is important for websites and primarily for this reason I have been meaning to move away from Bluehost (my old hosting company) for a little while and was kicked into action last week after a couple of emails and comments talking about the slow load times everyone has been experiencing and then on Friday I experienced a 12s load time on a decent connection. Bluehost were pretty fast when I started with them a couple of years ago but they have got much worse recently, a development that I suspect might be the result of their shift to an unlimited storage offer and the difficulties with planning server capacity that resulted.
- The largest part of this community is based in the UK and a UK based host should give them slightly faster page load times
- I liked the idea of local customer service
- Their package seemed about right for a blog of this size (150-200k page views per month)
- When I called them up to ask whether they would help me move to them from Bluehost they set out a very simple and easy process – download a full back up from Bluehost, upload it to the TSOHost servers, let them know and they would rebuild the blog out of the backup
