Actor – Marketer – Detailer – Host

When Web Hosting Goes Bad

I’ll tell you exactly who the culprit was towards the end of the story.

I had experienced 5 consecutive years of unparalleled service and very good site hosting performance with this provider with just one exception. That one service glitch had happened in the last year and while it lasted a little less than a day, that’s too long for a business with a website.

So I was looking elsewhere once again for good, reliable, hosting providers, who didn’t charge an arm and a leg, and who provided cutting edge WordPress support.

Timing on the possible server migration kept me at that operations center for one final year. I committed to one last annual contract and that week, the company stopped responding to basic tech “trouble tickets”.
For over 5 years, this company had always replied rapidly (within minutes) to these tickets, now that I was on the much more expensive machine, there seemed to be no reply at all.

My heart sank as important technical issues regarding my clients email accounts could not be quickly resolved. Some simple site updates had to wait.

It took a couple weeks for me to get my first responses, which were all versions of, “We’re very sorry we just switched to this new contact system. Thank you for your patience.”

During that month, I discovered that “chat” was now the best way to get somebody, although they were often unwilling or unable to help.

I also learned that i was basically on my own with this server and that I should start migrating sites off to a new environment as soon as possible.

Site downtime increased before I was able to move everybody. Customer service was a shadow of itself just a year earlier. It was a painful 3 months of pretty much continuous site migration work. My own was the last to go.

But the new home, Site Ground, was offering stellar support in the form of 1 free site migration with each new hosting account, and invaluable answers to WordPress transfer and setup questions.

What a relief to be moved completely away from that former Site5 machine and into the Site Ground network operations center in Chicago.

Get 60% off hosting at SiteGround for an entire year by clicking here.

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