Foreign Perspectives

For the second time in a month 1and1 took it upon themselves to take all my sites hosted with them offline.

Each time it cost me over $100 in lost income so I’m in the process of moving everything to a much cheaper and, so far, more reliable hosting service. One thing I’ve also decided to do is to put a few things in place to make it easier to switch to a backup service at short notice. As it was, I was able to move OurInns over to what will shortly become our main hosting service (EUKHost) but I’ll be starting to build that capability into the hosting setup of the remaining domains too over the next couple of weeks.

One thing that stopped me moving everything over is that I use 1and1 as the registrar for a number of the domains. On the whole, using your registrar as your host is simpler but usually isn’t a good move and I ended up in that situation for various historical reasons and I’ve been thinking of a bit of a tidyup for a while now.

The other thing that held me back from establishing a true contingency hosting site is simply that I’ve an awful lot of information online courtesy of the listings sites. The transfer that’s going on whilst I write this is over 200MB for instance and that’s not including the databases associated with that information. Quite a scary amount of information, isn’t it?

Step one of my move is “simply” moving the data which will probably take me the rest of the week to get through as I need to setup the databases on the new hosting site which always takes a little while to do.

Step two will be going through the domain registrations and rationalising them somewhat. One thing I’m considering is a move to iPowerWeb for the registrations which at $6.50/year is less than the $9.99/year that I’m currently paying but also comes with whois privacy which would be handy.