New Hosting Experience @InMotionHosting

UPDATE: The 30 days upgrade timeframe turned out to be wrong – the upgrade was done yesterday. Not perfectly, it must be admitted, but everything is now good and the sites are performing well. The tech I was working with last night was very good. I decided that research before signing up for the first package is critical. If I had chosen the VPS from the start and simply migrated my sites there, I think all would have been well! I’ve started using the features of the VPS now to create new accounts and cPanels for all my different sites. This means that if anyone manages to break into one of my sites, they would not be able to simply gain access to all the others and see the files of all the other ones. With separate cPanels, each site, in effect, is in its own hosting environment. If you are moving a large Symbiostock site to a new host, I think I would still recommend Inmotion, but choose the VPS package from the start ($27.95 a month for 2 years) and I think you will have a good experience. You can reach them via this link (and I get a small payment if you do!)

I mentioned that I moved all my sites to Inmotion Hosting over the past couple of weeks. As you may have noticed, performance has not been good – the page loading times are slow for all my sites. I now realize that my stock photo site, BackyardStockPhotos.com has to run an automated server task every minute and that is resulting in all my sites being limited in terms of processor capacity.

I’m doing my best to resolve this, but for others thinking of moving intensive sites – and the Symbiostock based stock photo sites need to do a lot of behind the scenes work to deliver images to buyers – here is my tale of woe and the issues I have had with InMotion trying to fix it. Bottom line – even though I have paid an extra $600 for VPS hosting, they tell me that I need to wait up to 30 days for them to migrate my sites to the new server! 

So what was my experience? I guess my mistake was assuming that a “Business Hosting” package would be all that I would need for my sites. Apart from this one, the others don’t get a lot of visitors each day, so isn’t “Business Hosting” what you would think you needed? Moving the first two sites was problematic as they had an addressing error in their name servers which sent my readers to a different website altogether, but after about 13 hours we got that fixed and the migration of the other sites (including this) went well.

Then I noticed the slow performance, both externally in terms of page loads and behind the scenes in writing new posts. So I investigated upgrades to higher powered servers and decided a VPS was what I needed. However, although you can buy a 2 year package as a “new” customer at a considerable discount, you can only upgrade with a one year term and hence pay several hundred dollars more for the privilege. I managed to talk to their sales people and someone there was able to do a temporary work around to add this 2 year package to my account and he told me that as soon as the VPS was provisioned, I could contact the VPS team to ask them to migrate my sites quickly to the new server.

So the VPS was provisioned, but no sign of a new support team. I contacted the Advanced Support team which provides support for the higher end VPS servers, but they simply passed me back to the regular support team. They could see that there is a ticket to move my sites, but the timeframe for internal moves is 30 days. So not only am I paying for the VPS server package and the old business hosting service, and getting poor performance – I need to do that for 30 days!

What is so laughable about this is that if I now went to a different hosting company, bought the appropriate VPS from the start, they would transfer my sites in a day or two. Instead, even though I am a “newish” customer trying to move to the right environment, I am stuck with this 30 days of hell.

So what is the message for someone looking for hosting? Inmotion are OK – they are polite and helpful but seem to be stuck with following their processes. You need to decide exactly what you need in terms of hosting before you sign up. If I had signed up for a VPS on day one, I’m sure I would have been OK, but it seems that internal changes are treated with a much lower priority than getting a new customer and their sites transferred across.

If you have had good experience with a VPS or similar hosting package at a different company, please let me know in the comments (or via the contact form). Thanks!