QOT successfully migrated from Dreamhost shared hosting to Knownhost managed VPS hosting today. After a few days unavoidable downtime, we are back to share our learning experience with you over the next few articles.
It all started when Dreamhost disabled our account a few days back. We have requested them to tell us specific issues which we might be unaware of so that we can fix them. While it was scary, it was heartening to see the daily database backup from WordPress Database backup plugin (my favorite plugin now) sitting in our email, but it was even more gracious of Dreamhost to allow FTP to let us backup our files via FTP. Whatever might be the issue, we had a great hosting experience with Dreamhost for over 3 years and I still recommend Dreamhost as one of the best shared web hosting services to start your site.
Knowing not where to start, I found some amazingly helpful people on Twitter (see my Twitter profile to follow them) who went out of the way to guide us, support us, suggest webhosting, and even provide personal tech support to set our server. There are just too many people to name, and I thank you all for your help and support.
Best managed VPS Hosting
As I analyzed some other popular shared hosting services like Doreo, Bluehost, Hostgator – we decided it was time to expand beyond the constraints of shared hosting (like plugin memory limits) and get a new VPS hosting server which will help QOT spread its wings to expand and grow to meet new demands of traffic.
The next day we started our search for a new managed VPS hosting service. Why managed VPS? – basically because with an unmanaged server you are on your own, you need to know your tech stuff correctly and know what you are dealing with on a daily basis. Since I am no expert with servers, it was safer to switch to managed VPS hosting.
I was recommended several unmanaged VPS hosting services like Linode, Slicehost; some semi-managed VPS hosting tools like MediaTemple and fully managed VPS hosting like Liquidweb, WiredTree, Servint, JaguarPC, and Knownhost.
Why Choose Knownhost Managed VPS?
The VPS package of Knownhost seemed affordable and feature rich. I sent an email to their sales team about how fast they could get us migrated and hosted. I expected a response in a few hours as it was off-working hours in US. To our surprise, we got an email back in less than a minute. I continued my series of queries and exchanges over the next hour and got surprisingly fast response each time. With such amazing support, my decision was easily made and I paid out for the VPS package at $40 per month. The excellent tech support continued over the next few days with the same incredible response time and is a major reason we are back online…
Though the site has been down now for over 3 days, we went through a lot – efforts to get our account back, get backups, find a new host, setup a new VPS, set up new private nameservers, wait for DNS propagation for over 24 hours. We learnt a lot from this experience and will continue to share it with QOT readers.
Stay subscribed and we will share our learning experience about Knownhost, VPS, WordPress migration and the fascinating lessons learnt ….