After thinking about it for several years, I finally decided that I had had enough of my old (original) host and it was time to move. This was no easy decision because moving after 18 or so years with the same host is not easy. There is a lot of stuff to unwind and try to understand how it works, not to mention email boxes that are not all mine.
The old host was one that I picked because they were new to the USA but not the hosting game (they already had a strong presence in Europe) so they were hungry and experienced all at the same time. I started with them within a year of them opening their first North American data center. It was funny because a lot of their marketing and support materials were still in German or Dutch.
Their service was always pretty good and got better over time. Early on they would have outages but as they matured, the uptime got to be really very good. Their prices went up over time but so did everyone else’s. Their customer support was terrible and never did improve but I didn’t need it very often (twice maybe?)
So why the move? They didn’t offer Let’s Encrypt free SSL. Their offer was that they would supply one SSL certificate for one domain (not the subdomains!) included in their “unlimited” shared hosting option. That wasn’t enough for me since I have a dozen or more domains and many more subdomains. It would have been outrageously expensive to get SSL certs for all those domains. So all but one of my domains didn’t have SSL and that is bad these days.
So I moved to a new host – Dreamhost – and went with a VPS, too. Two big moves for me. I’ve had some experience with them in the past with other projects and thought they did a pretty good job.
Now I am in the process of moving everything to Dreamhost. It has been a slog. I’m getting better at it, though, so the last domain to move is soggycity.com which has the majority of email boxes but really lightweight web services. Everything else has moved.
And everything has SSL by default! Hopefully, nobody will notice.
[UPDATE] And it is done. Everything seems to be working. Except my build/release system. It is broken. [sigh] Fixing that is next.