I purchased the domain, nordquist.org, back in 1999. At the time I asked around for suggestions for a good hosting company. One of my friends suggested a company with a weird name: NoMonthlyFees. As the name says, this hosting company charged a one time $250 fee but, from then on, you didn’t pay a monthly hosting fee. It seemed like a good deal at the time, and continued to be so because their service was stellar. If I had a problem I’d fill out a form and within minutes I’d receive a response saying when the problem would be fixed. But over the past few years I’ve seen a lot more problems with their SMTP/POP servers and my website experienced a lot more downtime.
After another week of SMTP problems I decided to look around. A friend suggested a hosting company called BlueHost so I checked out their website. It was nearly 1 am in Seattle and I was surprised to see a “Chat Live” link on their front page. I figured there was no way someone would be up this late to field questions. But I clicked anyway, and in less than 30 seconds, I was connected to a friendly rep who answered all my questions. At this point, I probably would have made the switch had he left it at that. But he did something fantastic. I’d told him earlier that I needed to transfer my domain, so while we were chatting, he checked out my website and noticed that I was hosting my own WordPress blog. He said, “Did you know we have one-click WordPress setup?” This may not seem like a big deal to many as moving a very simple website and setting up email on another host is usually quite trivial. But moving my blog and its databases, templates, themes and plug-ins could take a while to get right.
So what I thought would take days to get completed took less than a couple of hours. Most of that time was spent FTP’ing my entire site and MySQL backups to my local machine, sorting through it all, and then uploading to Bluehost. I would have never guessed the entire process would go as smoothly as it did.
My email is back to normal and my blog is running must quicker than before. I’m very impressed with Bluehost so far.
Nordquist Blog 