Ade in Business

If you can see this, my transfer to a new web host was complete. If you can’t see this, then you’re probably Ed Illig playing mind games with me. I spent the greater part of the last few couple days migrating to DreamHost from another shared hosting provider that I’ll refrain from mentioning (FormSpring and Ponyfish remain on dedicated hosting at GoDaddy).

I actually setup a DreamHost account a couple months ago when I was in a frenzy about some terrible support from my previous host (I think the people who run web hosting companies are the same type of people who run cable companies). I was well within DreamHost’s 97 day money back guarantee period, and starting to think I’d never get around to migrating, when my old host announced that they wouldn’t backup the servers anymore unless you paid them more money each month. Huh?

DreamHost is cheaper, provides more bandwidth, more disk space, more features, and has a better reputation for customer service. Given the extremely competitive market they’re in, it’s amazing that they’ve stood out from the crowd. I’ve seen a handful of bloggers over the last few months mention the company in the last few months, all with positive reviews. There’s even someone out there that setup the Unofficial DreamHost Blog. I think you’ve “made it” as a small company when you have an independent person setup a blog about your company.

That said, I was frustrated to see they were experiencing massive email issues the day I decided to migrate. So it goes.

Here’s the condensed version of the support thread between me and my old host that set me off in the frenzy to find another web host. My comments are paraphrased, his are exact. I should also point out this guy owns the hosting company.

Me: I have a dedicated server hosted elsewhere that usually sends me regular notification emails, but they keep bouncing. It just stopped working this morning.

Nick Burns: There’s no real way to resolve this with your setup. Obviously it would be easiest if the domain was hosted on our servers.

Me: I’m just trying to forward some email — I don’t want to move the other site to your servers just to send email from one account to the other. Like I said, this worked before.

Nick Burns: It really should have never worked properly.

Me: What? I’m just trying to forward email. Isn’t that a pretty basic thing?

Nick Burns: [copies and pastes an earlier response verbatim, then closes the ticket shortly afterward]

And wouldn’t you know, despite the unresolvable setup, it just started magically working the next day. Did I mention I had been with that host for about 3 years?