We just went through the whole process and it is rough, but we had a host that just was miserable. The worst part is it was not hard to get through to tech support, but impossible to get through to anyone who could support us, if you get my drift.

We went to a dedicated server for our sites, and even though there was a good deal of pain, it is now worth it to have a tight server that we can keep humming.

If you need a referral at a later time, don’t hesitate to call.

Tom

As lame as it sounds, I’ve decided to simply upgrade with InMotion for the time being. I finally talked with someone from their tech support and he was extremely helpful in explaining the situation (much better than the woman who was originally handling my account!). I’m definitely bummed that they don’t advertise the “acceptable” resource (CPU) usage, but that seems to be pretty standard in the industry.

At this point, I’ve decided to upgrade mainly because it doesn’t require me to reset EVERYTHING. When I think of all the steps and troubleshooting that would be involved in moving to a new host (emails, blogs, wikis, etc), I caved. With that said, I’m glad to know about all these other resources and I will definitely keep this information in my back pocket to be potentially used at a later date!

Thanks again to everyone!

Robust, good tech support…

As others have indicated, you want to ensure that you aren’t getting into an oversold server. I co-own a web hosting service and that is something we do NOT do.

If you’re over some nebulous resource usage quota, you might also look at how you’re caching your WP pages (if at all). Having the whole lot served dynamically is BRUTAL. We are currently working with a newly launched site that has been simultaneously DuGG and gizmodo’ed and we kept it going.

Also note the communication with the host — are you dealing with someone who can make allowances for traffic spikes? If your host is overselling, even a 4% usage of bandwidth can put you into the ‘cost us money’ category for your host.

I just wanted to add, that before I co-located, I hosted w/ Parcom and they were an excellent shared web hosting company to deal with. If you’re doing a ASP.net based web site, I’d highly recommend them. The only thing I didn’t like about them is they put my MS SQL DB behind a firewall, so I couldn’t use the database tools on my machine against my hosted DB. (Dunno if they still do that or not)

Dustin,

I dunno how well they’d host WordPress (but they do offer PHP/MySQL on Win 2003).

My brother-in-law works for Parcom Internet Services (www.parcom.net). They are a local company located in Renton and have been around for approximately 10 years. Very willing to work with their customers to get them the right plan at an affordable price.