I feel sick - Looking for a new webhost

3949 Views 42 Replies 33 Participants Last post by Carradee, Mar 8, 2015

ML-Larson

Discussion Starter · Mar 7, 2015

I'm looking for a new host, because my current one is crap. Tonight, I tried to switch over to BlueHost, but received so much run around within the first five minutes, before realising they'd overcharged me by $200 by adding packages I explicitly opted out of when I signed up.

So, now I'm angry, and hoping my husband doesn't look at the bank account before I get these charges reversed, because he will have a heart attack. In the meantime, does anybody have any recommendations for a cheap but sturdy hosting company that will let me transfer my domain and my Wordpress site without being absurd about it? I won't be able to even doing anything now for at least a week because of this, and I'm especially annoyed because this was one of WP's recommended hosts.

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Josh St. John

· #2 · Mar 7, 2015

I highly recommend HostGator. They do charge a fee to move your domain name over, I believe it's $8.00. More than once they've called me to check in, answer any concerns, and even provide me with 1-3 months free of hosting. Amazing customer service.

Michael J Elliott

· #3 · Mar 7, 2015

I'm with GoDaddy and their staff support is great, their prices are really good to (well here in Aus, probably even cheaper in the U.S) I have my WP site with them and it only costs me a few dollars a year, I'm sure they could transfer you over for a small charge.
I hope it all gets sorted out for you soon

ML-Larson

Discussion Starter · #4 · Mar 7, 2015

Michael J Elliott said:
I'm with GoDaddy and their staff support is great, their prices are really good to (well here in Aus, probably even cheaper in the U.S) I have my WP site with them and it only costs me a few dollars a year, I'm sure they could transfer you over for a small charge.
I hope it all gets sorted out for you soon

GoDaddy's actually the one I'm with. My pages take about 30 seconds to load, no matter what template I use, or what's on the page.

Chrissy

· #5 · Mar 7, 2015

I recommend https://www.mddhosting.com/

They currently are running a 25% sale too!

Josh St. John

· #6 · Mar 7, 2015

Here are some Host Gator coupons: http://www.retailmenot.com/view/hostgator.com

Amity Lassiter

· #7 · Mar 7, 2015

I'm with DreamHost and I <3 <3 <3 them. I sent them a low priority ticket for slow loading pages a couple months after I started using them and they were on it right away.

ML-Larson

Discussion Starter · #8 · Mar 7, 2015

Josh St. John said:
Here are some Host Gator coupons: http://www.retailmenot.com/view/hostgator.com

Chrissy said:
I recommend https://www.mddhosting.com/

They currently are running a 25% sale too!

Oh cool. Thanks, guys. I'm not going to do anything until they give me my money back, so hopefully the sales and coupons will still be good next week.

555aaa

· #9 · Mar 7, 2015

I'm with godaddy and my pages take a couple seconds to load. I also work with a medium size non-profit which runs its website from them, and uses Wordpress. They don't have the problem you seem to be having. Sorry to hear about your difficulties.

Joe Trent

· #10 · Mar 7, 2015

Call the Bluehost billing dept. in the morning and they will take care of your problem. They messed up and charged me for a site that I cancelled. Once I discovered the mistake and called them, they refunded my card in less than an hour. They're a great company, give them a chance. I've had lots of sites hosted with them for about 5 years with few problems.

If your website is taking around 30 seconds to load, it's probably not the host where you're at. Plugin's that don't play well together, crappy theme, huge images? I'd pay someone that knows what they're doing to take a look at it instead of moving it. Post a link to it, I might be able to see something goofy.

Nic

· #11 · Mar 7, 2015

Name.com is also hosting sites, and not the worst host out there.

[email protected]

· #12 · Mar 7, 2015

I HATED GoDaddy. My load times were super slow (main issue I had to leave it). I also didn't enjoy the cheap, spammy feel I got from GoDaddy. When I looked into moving, I noticed I could get a whole lot more for my $10 a month somewhere else.

I switched to SquareSpace and am much happier now. They don't try to push add-on services. My load times went way down. I just haven't had any issues. I don't use WP, so I don't know how easy that would be to work in. But I imagine it wouldn't be an issue.

Julian Bray

· #13 · Mar 7, 2015

I've built and hosted sites for the last decade or so.

My experiences of (a limited set of) companies is:

1&1: customer service was terrible. They were fine till you wanted to do something.
Hostmonster: great company, great service but left them in the end because the server i was on had spammers on it and my emails get on getting blacklisted by those annoying blacklisting companies.

I am now with Vidahost. They are quite small and UK based but their service has been impeccable. I pay about £75 a year and host up to about 16 sites (I host my friends and family and a couple of older client sites). They transferred everything for me and have the usual backend and plugins available.

dmburnett

· #14 · Mar 7, 2015

I use weebly, but I don't know if you could transfer you wordpress to it. I know you can point your domain to it easily (I have a GoDaddy domain name), but as far as Wordpress I just don't know. Weebly is free for two sites, after that you have to pay. Unless you are just in love with your Wordpress site they might be something to look into. My site is pretty in depth with lots of pages, a blog, and I rarely have trouble with it.

http://www.DanaMichelleBurnett.com

Chris Dietzel

· #15 · Mar 7, 2015

I'm currently with GoDaddy and looking to switch. I'm definitely going to look into a couple of the options recommended here.

RA Books

· #16 · Mar 7, 2015

Relichost are good for smaller sites. Once you start getting heavy traffic, they start having issues, but otherwise they are OK.

Ros_Jackson

· #17 · Mar 7, 2015

Joe Trent said:
If your website is taking around 30 seconds to load, it's probably not the host where you're at. Plugin's that don't play well together, crappy theme, huge images? I'd pay someone that knows what they're doing to take a look at it instead of moving it. Post a link to it, I might be able to see something goofy.

I second this suggestion. Google have a tool called Pagespeed Insights. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ This will tell you what is slowing down your site. Unfortunately the answers you get may be difficult to understand, and the solutions can be very technical, but it will at least point you in the right direction.

Deke

· #18 · Mar 7, 2015

Godaddy was my host for years…great customer service. But the renewal was like $15/month. I am in the process of moving to Arvixe and re-creating my sites there with a new wordpress theme. Arvixe is like $4/month and less if you find a coupon. The customer service isn't the same, but I like the price.

MyraScott

· #19 · Mar 7, 2015

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it's very unlikely your host is the cause of slow site loading. More often than not, it's something on your page that's slowing things down. All the headaches of moving to a new host and you're likely to have the same pageload issue.

I've found BlueHost to be really responsive for customer service, more than any other hosting company I've worked with. Call them up and see if they can fix it.

Google's Webmaster tools can tell you what's slowing down your page as well. It's probably some extension or plugin.

Elizabeth Ann West

· #20 · Mar 7, 2015

I hated Godaddy because the kept charging me over and over again even after I unclicked boxes etc. to NOT AUTORENEW!

I've used Hostgator for 3 years now, we've had an outage literally maybe 4 times since then. But it wasn't just Hostgator down, but also Bluehost etc. because a data center went down. And their customer support always responds right away which is nice.

1 - 20 of 43 Posts

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