Vidahost: One of my better decisions.

I have the tendency to change my hosting with the same regularity that I change my underpants - roughly every six to eight months as a rule.

This time I had to change things up due to my own stupid fault. You see, Butler Sheetmetal is on a dot com and it’s generally been hosted somewhere else in the world other than dear old Blighty. And that means Google regards butlersheetmetal.com as a non-uk site and has never indexed us in local uk search results and we’ve even suffered in the uk general web results since Christmas.

I also saw it as a bit of an opportunity to do a spot of shopping around as I’ve always been of the opinion that I didn’t really need a dedicated box. Neither am I a fan of all the stuff you can do (read: break) behind the scenes on a dedicated server.

So I set about various web hosting forums hoping to get a relatively straight answer to a relatively straight question: ‘What kind of hosting do I need?’ It wasn’t too long before I started losing my footing on all the snake oil like a bamboozled Bambi on ice.

It didn’t take me too long to figure out that the vast majority were ‘advising’ me to go with the respective types of hosting that they offered or were wanting to offer. We ran the full hosting gauntlet from ‘good’ shared, to reseller, to vps, to dedicated and then all the way back. I seriously had less of a clue half way through the exercise than I did at the beginning.

I’ll accept that I’m a crap customer and that I don’t exactly communicate my requirements as concisely as I might do, but that is my point - if I knew what I needed then I wouldn’t be asking the bloody question in the first place. All I wanted was a good, honest host who understood my requirements, could support them, and wasn’t in danger of breaking their (or my) fingers trying to get hold of my wallet.

I was almost on the verge of giving up and changing to UK hosting with the bunch I was looking to move from, and then I found Vidahost. I don’t know how I missed them originally, but I suddenly found their business+ hosting packages and I thought I’d fire an email in their direction. I expected a swift response but I also expected the usual canned guff that comes with it.

Of course the reply was swift, but I wasn’t prepared for the depth of response, courtesy, or their unwillingness to plop me on a plan/server that I didn’t need. They even managed to answer a few burning questions that I had yet to ask.

You’ll go a long way in my book with telepathic customer service.

It didn’t take me long to decide that I simply had to give them a go. Every email had been an object lesson in online customer care and their package ticked more than enough boxes. I was only a bit worried about how The Tinbasher would fare in terms of performance, but I was quite happy that I wasn’t going to get booted off for excessive database connections and that Dominic, their main man who I’d been rather impressed with, was a PHP developer/programmer - at least Wordpress could be understood even though not supported.

So, I’ve managed to cut hosting costs by over £100 a month, separated all domains onto their own respective accounts, been taught a thing or two about customer service and found us indexed in google.co.uk. Yes, I know things could change but right now I’ve never been happier with my host/hosting.

And as for The Tinbasher’s performance? How do you think it’s running? Did you even notice the move? Do you care?

[Disclaimer: The above is not a paid advertisement nor does it contain any affiliate links. I'm just chuffed. ]