So I am going through my first change of web hosting providers. I was very unimpressed with my previous provider, who shall remain nameless unless you ask me personally, so I needed a new one. I was surprised at how few resources there are for wading through the endless supply of providers. I ended up going with HostMonster. Maybe because it’s almost Halloween and the “monster” part was cool. OK, not at all, that just came to me. I liked their responsiveness to my questions, the 24/7 online chat support, PHP5 and RoR capabilities, unlimited subdomains, and great price ($5.95/month for 24 months.) I have used other hosting services for my freelance work, and they have sucked equally as bad as the company I found for my personal site, so I hope “the monster” is much better, and the bar is not set very high.

Yes, changing providers is a pain in the ass. I’m not totally through the process yet, but I’m well under way and hopefully everything should be where it belongs within a week. Truthfully, I don’t understand it all, or even very much of it really, but I followed the directions carefully. Honestly, HostMonster was very clear about what I needed to do to move my stuff over, and I thought the process was as smooth as can be expected on their end. We’ll see how the rest goes.

So why did I have to change providers? I want to play with some of the PHP development frameworks available (Cake and the like), and my old company wouldn’t tell me when they were going to have PHP5 installed. Since most of these frameworks depend on PHP5, it was ridiculous for me to stay with some one that wasn’t helping me out.