Introduction.

After 10 years of having good and reliable hosting services (at least I thought), I moved my hosted domains to other web hosting accounts and closed my original main hosting account.

Why and what I learned of this will be “food” for several posts you can expect to pop up during the next few weeks. Today we start with the first lesson I learned.

When I started my first (and main) hosting account 10 years ago, the hosting services I was looking for at that time needed to be competitive priced, used technical advanced equipment, use their own servers (they still do), have high speed links and needed to have reseller hosting available (not so common at that time). I found that hosting service in Florida, close to where I was living at that time. They became the standard I was looking for in any other hosting services.

For many years I had reliable service, very few problems and most issues were attended promptly. The bulk of the domains I host are my own. I do host some domains for a few of my customers as well.

Because of Google preference to see links coming in from other IP’s, I signed up a few other small (and cheap) hosting accounts just for linking purposes. Also some country specific domains (like .nl and .com.br) needed local hosting. So, over time I managed 4 to 6 hosting accounts at the same time. I prefer cPanel hosting and try to keep that the minimum requirement when looking for new hosting. I also believe the cPanel is the most friendly user panel for anyone to start his hosting experience with.

Why moving?

It all started when a customer reported there were all strange characters in the posts on his forum. And yes there were, in posts previous displayed correct. Okay, this is a forum in Portuguese language, using some characters not used in English. But suddenly they displayed very weird. Clearly it was a character encoding issue. My host had no explanation, the worse comment I got was “your database is fried, why don’t you restore”.

Good question, I never did routine backups. When I upgrade a script or test some new features I might just do a database backup. Other data I could upload again. One feature my original hosting sold me on was their routine backup schedule. But that was 10 years ago, now you are on your own!

LESSON ONE – Setup up a Full Backup routine for all of your sites.

I believe it is best to store Full Backup’s on your hard drive or at another host. The routine frequency depends fully on your site activities, updates and modifications. I will do (now) at least one every three months. We are talking about a “full system backup”. Other backups are also recommended to perform regular (database, e-mail etc).You can initiate the full backup through the cPanel, but you cannot restore through the cPanel. The full backup can also be used for moving domain content to another host. How to do this we will cover in detail in another post. Stay tuned!

Fred Lotgering

LotCon Biz Solutions

Affordable Hosting
Affordable Hosting


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