I’ve migrated and upgraded my Virtual Hosting

(and been reminded that in this internet world you pays your money and takes your choice!)

I hadn’t been happy with my hosting provider 123-reg for a while:  For running both my Drupal website and SugarCRM services the limitations of the virtual hosting package offered by 123-reg had started to niggle me.

• Speed of applications loading is so important:  And having to wait 20-30 seconds for applications to load up wasn’t good!   I can appreciate that virtual machine environments have to do their thing, but it doesn’t stop the feeling of frustration as you wait for the application to load:  Imagine how my clients would be feeling!

• Why don’t you have “shell” access? was a question I was repeatedly asked by my system administrator.  Not being able to configure and setup stuff at the Command Line stopped me delivering more advanced hosting services – I wasn’t happy.

• Support was another touchstone of “wanting to be treated as I want to treat my clients”, and having to accept email based canned responses wasn’t good.   When I needed support, I needed support, not “that’s answer 5-H from the knowledge base”...

• And wanting a Service Level Agreement to underpin my SugarCRM cloud computing service wasn’t too much to ask was it?  Apparently it is with 123-reg....

• As an internet consultant, what also galled me is that 123-reg failed to understand that my questions were opportunities to up-sell me with additional services.  Not once did it register in their auto-provisioned world that here was a customer wanting to take their hosting to the next level...

So As Jason Fried says in his excellent business book, Rework, “Scratch your own itch”:  I decided to take the plunge and migrate my LAMP virtual hosting to a higher quality, professional hosting service provider.  I selected Gladserv through personal recommendation.

• But I was pretty unimpressed when I was informed by 123-reg Support that the DNS TTL is set to 24 hours and could not be changed. That caused me all kinds of customer service challenges as it meant my services needed to be down for 24 hours whilst the domain names were updated...   (I ended up doing the SugarCRM migration on a Bank Holiday and website migration in sync with planned downtime)

The rest of the migration went according to plan, including moving my IMAP email using Mozilla Thunderbird,  and at all times I had the reassurance of a real support consultant from Gladserv on the end of the phone and email to ensure all went smoothly.

So I’ve now successfully migrated all my services and am looking forward to developing my Web Apps cloud computing offer.  And reflecting what Jason Fried says in “ReWork” - “I think you’ll love it because I love it”...