Hostgator Questions : help in making up my mind about

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For Hostgator FAQ or any questions about hostgator webhosting or hostgator sales read this query posted by kloomis on 14 November 2007

I am an independent web designer that offers hosting service, mostly to my web design clients. On average, I am hosting about a dozen domains. In the 10+ years that I have been doing this, I have gone thru four different hosting companies. In reading “Customer Reviews” forum, I realize that my experience was not that unique. Hosting company starts out great (personal involvement of owner), company grows (takes on support staff that is less knowledgeable than owner), company over extends its resources (owner no where to be found), company starts to delineate their customers (big guys get all the attention), company raises pricing and lowers quality of support for entry level customers (no need for new accounts, and I suspect the “big guys” and the owner are off playing golf).

This has happened to me 3 times. And now it seems to be happening again, but this time it’s with a hosting coming that seems to have fallen short of their growth projections and is losing their commitment to this business. I have been casually looking for a new hosting company for several months, but had just about given up on finding a hosting service with enough of my needs/desires met to warrant making the switch. Last week I stumbled upon HostGator, because a new client has her domain hosted here.

The way I run my hosting service is probably different than most. My clients are people that want nothing to do with the management side of having a web site. I do not think any of them over the years has even looked at their user cpanels. When they want a new email address they contact me. Only one or two even have their own FTP account.

I have installed Gallery for two of my artist clients, but they can barely upload pictures, let alone customize Gallery. So I even do that for them. The same holds for a guestbook and a blog. I also ran a bulletin board using phpbb.

If I decide to move to HostGator (or any other hosting company for that matter), I will be doing all the work associated with transferring each domain. with my current host, I can set up a new domain and I have a way to access that domain via http and ftp before the name servers are updated. So if I start hosting a new domain, I can have everything setup and running on both hosts and then change the name servers and as the migration takes place, the transition is almost completely invisible to visitors. This works for all but a few php applications that require the the name server migration be complete, i.e., Gallery and osCommerce.

My plan would be to move one domain at a time. I would contact my client and tell them that the transition will take about 2 days and ask them to forestall any updates to their web pages, gallery and oscommerce. Then I would move over all the static files and set up all the email accounts. When everything is setup, I would, in the middle of the night, set up a “Service Temporarily Interrupted” index page and set up any php apps and transfer the associated MySQL databases. At this point I would change the name servers and do the final configurations for the php apps.

I just need to know if this is possible with HostGator. I’d also like to know from others that have done this, if my strategy seems feasible. Or, is there a better way. And, are there any gotchas I am missing.

Finally, I know that the scenario I describe lends itself to a reseller account, but money is really tight right now. As far as I can tell, the biggest difference, besides disk space and bandwidth, between the “Baby” Shared hosting plan and the “Aluminum” Reseller hosting plan, is the WMH. It occurs to me that since none of my clients use their cpanel, I could get by with the “Baby” account. One concern would be how easy things would be to migrate from a “Baby” to an “Aluminum” account if the hosting side of my business grows. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Please excuse my rambling. It is so nice to have a forum of current customers to bounce ideas off and find solutions. That alone may be enough to get me to switch hosts, so thanks in advance to your replies.

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