Why the website move

Published on 24 August 2007 • Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

If you are a regular to the site, you may know that I have had some great service from my previous hosting provider, Hetzner. Which may make you wonder why I decided I needed to move the site. Well, the reality is that it’s about the money at the end of the day. When I joined Hetzner earlier in the year, I took their Basic package since it met my needs, and I was able to sign up and get sorted very quickly. Plus, they’re a South African company, so getting help over the phone wasn’t hard. What I didn’t realize was how much space I got from my previous provider.

So I ended up with tight limits on what I could upload. Eventually, I exceeded it (mostly with the photos) and started paying extra per month. Now, based on how many photos I had sitting to upload, I realized this would get expensive and put a hold on uploading them (until today). Interestingly enough, I hardly used any of the other services on the package—bandwidth never exceeded my limits, no mailboxes were used (I have one forwarded to GMail, etc.), so all I needed was disk space. I had thought of using sites like Flickr but it didn’t appeal to me too much. And when my wife decided to start her own part-time business and she needed a site, I decided to look around again for something that would meet both our needs, as with Hetzner, I would need another package.

Browsing the Drupal site (which I use for my CMS), I found a list of recommended hosting providers and started to go through that. I found Web Hosting Buzz through that and was very impressed—especially with their 30-day money-back guarantee, which put me at ease. I signed up for my wife’s site first, got that set up, and once that was online, moved my site across.

To give you an idea of the differences:

It’s kind of a no-brainer for me! And I’ve already put WHB to the test with some interesting support calls—they’ve come through each time. One example: I saw SSH access listed on their site (which Hetzner didn’t provide), and when I inquired, it was set up in minutes for me.

Would I recommend Hetzner still? Definitely, but you need to be the right type of customer—the kind who needs South African hosting and ideally has their own server. Nowadays, for personal sites, the options (free or paid) overseas are too good to compare.