New Host
For anyone who has had to change hosts, you know it can be a tedious process. I will share some of the things I had to endure and hopefully it will be useful to others who may one day have to do the same.
Why did I change hosts? My former host was having issues with stability and decided to discontinue the service. This came right out of the blue and it was not very well timed, but these things tend to happen in this manner.
What research did I do? I looked up many websites where there were ratings and such and asked lots of friends and some people I didn’t know too well for their opinions. I didn’t have much time, so I tried to make the most of it and take in as much information as possible. I found that there was quite a range of pricing for hosting.
One alternative was to use a dedicated server which runs about $100 monthly. This is a really nice solution, but the drawback other than price is diskspace. If a company dedicates and entire box to you, they are likely not going to put a large hard drive in it. There are upgrades available but they are very costly, upping your monthly costs by $20-$100 depending on the amount of space you want. Also, ram upgrades are very expensive too and these are monthly charges.
Probably the most popular hosts for regular end users are shared. The least expensive and most popular of these boast very large disk space up to 350G and a monthly transfer rate of 3500GB. This is an incredible amount of space that most people will never use. I actually called 3 places: Bluehost, Host Monster and Lunar Pages. The result of calling Lunar Pages are still somewhat unknown because I couldn’t really understand the sales agent. I discovered that Bluehost and Host Monster were owned by the same company. The funny thing was that I even got the same guy on the phone when I called the second one.
I first called Bluehost and spoke to “Joel” in sales. Maybe because I work in sales and customer service and used to supervise at a call center, I have higher standards but talking to Joel was a great experience in helping me decide not to go with Bluehost. He seemed completely disinterested in getting my business and if I wasn’t speaking, there was totally dead air. I was shocked that this kind of person was in “sales”. When he answered the phone when I called Host Monster , I did the mature thing and hung up. 
Although I was initially excited at the amount of space and decent pricing of these companies, I was quickly disappointed and crossed them off my list of prospective new hosts.
One of the things I had liked about my previous host was that it was a smaller business and if I needed anything, I could talk directly to him. He had been quite helpful in getting things up and running for me. I really thought a lot about which host to choose and examined all of the numbers closely.
I had viewed the hosting on Godaddy’s site not very long ago and I found that the pricing was a bit high considering the amount of bandwidth and space they allotted. I decided to give a quick visit again. This time I noticed that they had vastly increased the space for their top 2 tier accounts of the 3. The most basic – Economy offered 5GB space with 250GB monthly transfer usage for $3.99 which the next step at Deluxe offered 100GB space with 1,000GB transfer space for $6.99. The Premium offered 500GB space and 2,000GB transfer for $14.99. Previously I had been using around 1.2B of space with around 10-15GB of monthly transfer so the Economy package probably would have worked, but I ended up deciding on the Deluxe because knowing that I have the extra space, I will think of ways to use more I’m sure.
How was the setup? I processed the account online and had it all set up in terms of hosting basics the same night. I was able to get ftp access fairly quickly. I uploaded all of my files overnight and then returned to the work in the morning. I ended up getting everything done the same day. The tedious part was creating the sql databases again on the server and then importing the ones from the previous site. Godaddy makes this fairly easy though with their intuitive tools. Once this was done, I had to edit my corresponding text files that contained the proper information for the server and such and I was done.
Why Godaddy? Apart from them improving their bandwidth allotment, I have used them for my domains for several years and never had an issue. I’ve never heard anyone complain about them. I found that some of the other companies would advertise deals on their front page and then once you got in deeper, they would say this only applies to account sign ups for 1 year. Godaddy is monthly but there are options to purchase longer plans with discounts. With my domain and hosting both with the same company, I can have everything on one bill as well.
Performance? It’s still early, but I find Godaddy every bit as fast as my last host which is around 600-750 kb/s for downloading. The only downside is that I lost some of the more recent posts on the forum, but that had nothing to do with the host.
It wasn’t my favorite way to spend a weekend as I really set my free time at a premium because I am usually so exhausted during the week from working long hours. I am glad that it’s done and I don’t think Godaddy is going anywhere anytime soon so the idea of switching hosts likely won’t come up for a long time.