When I first started this website, cost was a significant factor for me. Arvixe was well rated, and they offered a free domain name registry with their hosting, so I signed up with them. That was in April of 2014. Unfortunately, in October of that year, Arvixe was bought out by Endurance International Group (EIG), and their service has declined steadily ever since. In looking for a new hosting company, my primary goal was now not cost, but to find a company that was not part of EIG. This proved more difficult than I expected, as most of the names I was familiar with had been acquired. I narrowed my choices down to SiteGround and A2 Hosting, and finally went with SiteGround. They are more expensive, and impose limits on storage, but they pride themselves on their support. After the problems I had with Arvixe support, this sounded good to me.
I had read a number of posts, like this one, about how you should have your domain name registry with a different company than your hosting. I had already set up an account with Namecheap to get the harvey.toys domain name, so I decided to transfer harveymercheum.com and harveymercheum.org to them as well as part of this transition. I did this, and once I got confirmation that the transfer was complete, I signed up with SiteGround and put in a support ticket asking them to transfer my hosting. Since I was going from one cPanel host to another, SiteGround performed the transfer for me for free. I had to change some settings in Namecheap and in my email, but I think I got everything set up properly.
This was all new to me, and I was a little scared, but I think it will all be worth it. I already see some potential benefits of using SiteGround, such as their integration of CloudFlare CDN with Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates.
I know I used a few technical terms above without defining them. If you have any questions or comments on this topic, please leave a comment below, use the Contact the Curator form, or post on Facebook. Thank you for your patience and your continued support of the Harvey Mercheum!