I think I knew deep down that GoDaddy wasn’t going to be the final web hosting but it was cheap. I also figured it was better than my previous web hosting at Network Solutions. GoDaddy was bigger.
But, my wife started complaining about email performance on our personal email accounts. I didn’t notice so didn’t make a priority. But, then one day I was using email during the day and not at night as was typical for me. I really noticed the performance issues. So, it was time to start researching another web hosting company.
I found a forum called Web Hosting Talk which looks like a good research point. I started looking through the forums and felt lost. Many people did say GoDaddy was terrible but it also seemed that every web hosting company mention was either the best for someone or the worst for someone else. So, I looked for other sources. Google searches went no where because most of the results where spam reviews. I stumbled upon a listing of WordPress hosting companies on WordPress.org. I wasn’t sure if the list wasn’t actually paid ads but figured I could review them individually and see what was posted at Web Hosting Talk. From that research, Media Temple looked like a possible candidate.
The price for the shared hosting looked good at $20 a month. They also included email accounts and full access via SSH. It didn’t look at user friendly as GoDaddy but I figured this was more of they didn’t hold your hand like GoDaddy. I found a promo code at RetailMeNot that saves $4 a month. I signed up.
I migrated the websites first. It took a little while to figure out how to migrate WordPress and phpBB and MySQL databases but a good learning experience. One thing I immediately liked was the SSH access since I could setup cron scripts to do database backups.
Email performance improved immediately and they included IMAP. I didn’t like the webmail interface compared to GoDaddy but it is functional.
To summarize, so far so good with Media. I did some testing using Pingdom and so far the Media Temple websites have better uptime but only a long period of time will tell.
