After a year of website hosting with InMotionHosting, it’s time for me to move once again.
Why? Well …
Firstly InMotionHosting is relatively expensive (I was paying $14/month for 4GB storage and 50GB bandwidth); I was prepared to pay extra for reliability – and they have been reasonably reliable. But …
Secondly there are some other proven reliable lower cost hosting companies – in particular Site5 which has been hosting NEMINI, JWardell and, through BungleSolutions, a number of other MINI related websites including MINIsOnTop and MINIs-Making-A-Wish.
Thirdly, Site5 offer much more (11GB storage and 400GB bandwidth) for almost half the price – $7.77/month!
Finally, Site5 allow me multiple websites in the one package.
Thus with renewal approaching on my InMotionHosting contract, I decided to switch to Site5 – in theory by the time you see this entry, the switch is complete and everything is working properly … but please let me know if you have any troubles; thanks!
M&I / GBMINI 
Ian, seems to be working fine (Sat 7:07AM)
Ian, why not just host on your home computer? Although it’s technically against the ToS for my provider (Brighthouse/Road Runner), port 80’s unblocked. $7/month is pretty darn cheap, I agree, but maybe it’d be less work if you just kept your site in your office?
I did try serving from here – just for experimentation – but nothing I tried could get through; I did use DMZ on my router so it seems Adelphia don’t allow the traffic.
I have Adelphia here at home and I can’t get through to my home network either. I could for about 2 months use ssh to access my work PC but then it appears they stopped it as nothing works now.
Cox on the other hand in San Diego, they don’t seem to mind at all. One more reason to dislike Adelphia.
Quick question – so is that $7.77 for all the domains, or $7.77 per domain? If the former, I might move my sites over there.
The $7.77/month gives you a “primary domain” but you can set up four more if you wish – and each functions as if it were a completely separate domain (except that its pages are in a subdirectory of your primary domain).
No extra cost!
[but Site5 does not include domain registration]
you need to add dbmini.us, whiteroofradio.com and gomotoring.com to that list as well 😉
No, each acts like it’s own separate account with their own cPanel. At least that is how my account works.
You should be happy here. I’ve been with them over 6 months and haven’t had any problems. When the odd thing comes up, I’ve never waited more than 15 minutes for someone from support to get back to me, and it is usually less than that!
Now if we can just get gbmini on WordPress…;)
How do you migrate the content within Movable Type and the Gallery?
Do you simply export the MT content to a text file and import it back in after confgiuring it on the new host?
What’s the process with the Gallery?
I’m curious because I am considering moving one of the sites I maintain and the gallery is pretty large and I don’t want to lose the image views and such.
Thanks-
Randy
DB,
I bow to your greater experience.
I have used a “domain pointer” for margaretandian, but I think you are describing “multiadmin accounts” which I haven’t tried. It looks like that feature would allow you to give part of your storage/bandwidth to someone else and they would have their own login / FTP / etc? Neat!
Randy,
I have Gallery v1 (not v2) – I FTP’ed the gallery directory and the albums directory down from the old hosting, then back up to the new hosting.
Then I manually edited config.php to alter the directories to take account of the new “/home/gbmininet/public_html/…”, and that was basically all I did.
Gallery setup complains about ‘register_globals’ but I just ignored it (for now anyway).
You have Gallery v2 which I haven’t used but I think as well as the above, you have a database file that needs to be moved over.
Right. Mine is a multi-admin account. Worked out better for me and all the sites I ‘host’
IMO, the first step in moving Gallery is a change to Coppermine, but that’s just me. I like it when cookies work! 😉
mmmmm, coooookies……
cool, maybe I’ll switch too, can’t beat good company! next question is then…. what’s a good (i.e. cheap) domain registrar?
godaddy.com
$9.20 a year and way less if you purchase for mare than that.
This makes another MINI site besides mine that runs on site 5. 🙂
I still use 1and1 for my domains – $6/year …
Ian – I’ve got kinda a mixed bag. INIW uses Gallery v2 which I really don’t care for after using it. My larger Gallery on Kuite.com is running 1.x.
Thanks for the informaton!
-Randy
Herman Miller! At Bath University in England, I lived just yards from a big Herman Miller – right on the banks of the Avon.
One BIG difference noticed already – Site5 is much much slower than InMotionHosting!
Their web page serving is a little slower, but not too bad – however the FTP service often stalls at the login.
Of course you expect some lower performance for a lower monthly fee …
Welcome, Ian.
I see my RSS aggragator is still not showing me updates to your blog, well I guess that should be independant of your host anyway. 🙂
After about 6 months now I’ve very happy with site5, but I was never impressed by their customer service, and their forums are not the open discussion that they used to be. But bottom line is the hosting and the administration utilities are great.
Glad to see you finally made the right move! 😉 Site5 is by far my best hosting provider ever. After a year with them, I have recommended so many people there and no one has had any major challenges yet. My downtime is very minimal. These guys are top notch.
Ahh yes Big Red as we call Herman Miller. The Bath location is one of our largest outside the US. One of our more successful systems products (aka modern cubes) over the last couple of years (called Abak) was developed over n Bath.
Small world eh?