Kjellquist Blog

If you noticed this blog posting responding alot faster today it’s because I have changed hosting provider for my web site including this blog. My previous web host provider of more than 5 years was iPower. In the beginning, iPower was inexpensive and provided pretty good service. However, over the past year service has significantly degraded. Pages were many times slow, e-mail occasionally was unavailable and the final straw was the MySQL disasters of the past months. I usually don’t frequent web sites setup to accumulate gripes but they are useful when checking for common issues. iPower complaints is one of these sites. Customer service is always an issue with shared hosting services since they are a cost driven business and people on telephones are a cost. But, when the only answer to well known legitimate performance issues is “We’re working on it” run to another provider.
The hosting service of this site and blog is HostMonster. While transfering web sites, MySQL databases, etc is never easy. it has been worth the effort; as you have probably noticed. Since I also decided to transfer the domain registration to HostMonster, I actually received a confirming telephone call! I know this is really a security feature of domain transfers but it definitely is a minor reassurance that there real people behind the hosting.
BTW, what do I think is causing iPower‘s problems? I believe they have grown too rapidly and not sufficiently invested in either infrastructure, hardware (servers etc.) or support processes (or a combination all these).
I’ve still got a few things to cleanup on the web site to finish the migration but stay tuned and I keep you up with my experience with HostMonster.
Here is some of the sites that I check for reviews before moving to HostMonster (note that BlueHost is owned by the same company)

Top 10 Hosting Sites
Best web hosting
Web Hosting Geeks
Web Hosting Reviews Check the relative ratings of iPower and HostMonster