Just to let you all know of some recent changes.

Firstly, my first blogging with WordPress anniversary is coming up very soon. I was reminded by this, when I discovered my year of hosting with IX Web Hosting, will finish on December 4th.

Not too many regrets

As anyone who has a website knows, choosing hosting can be a frustrating decision. Over the past year, IX for the most part, have been pretty good. Downtime was never too serious, and any issues I had, their Live Chat was usually pretty quick to resolve. However, some weird things have been happening recently, which I’m not going to take the time to get into.

Basically, the little niggling issues, coupled with the limited domains permitted on one account (the package I was on was limited to eight domains, which is more than the average host allows for $6.95/month), was enough to cause me to keep my eyes peeled for other options.

The options…

A reputation for reliability, and good customer service, was important to me. My initial thought was to maybe go with Media Temple, and their Grid Server option. It’s an excellent choice for $20/month. The service is fast, and should you get a huge spike in traffic, it’ll cope in circumstances where other shared packages will crash.

Having said that, the other company in the back of my mind, were Midphase. Now Midphase are repeatedly winning awards for their service. The trouble is, many claim to have won awards of this and that. The difference in Midphase (for me at least), was that they come highly recommended by Chris Pearson. Among many things, Chris is a talented web designer, with an acute eye for detail, and definitely not the kind of guy to put up with a slack hosting service.

I was talking to Chris recently about a few things, and one of them was hosting. A few days after we were talking, and AN Hosting came out with a huge hosting deal. Now AN Hosting are a company who were bought over by Midphase some time ago, and although they kept the AN Hosting name, it’s all Midphase below the surface.

An amazing hosting deal

Now, I’m not one to get sucked in by exaggerated hosting figures. However, along with the 999GB Disk Space, and 9999GB Bandwidth, their crazy Halloween deal offered 999 domain names on each account. All this for $6.95/month for a one year contract (they were actually offering it for $4.95/month, but that was for a 4 year contract). On top of that, they also offer a free site transfer service for new customers too.

I was sold! I’ll never have to worry about using up domain allowances again (at least for the next year).

The guys have been great too. The ticket service is quite fast, they’ve moved all my sites and databases over for me, the live chat is usually manned pretty well, and they all speak good English! I haven’t changed all the nameservers of my sites yet, but as you read this, you’re reading a site which is now powered by AN Hosting!

Theme competition development

The other thing is the competition theme. As I indicated in the last post, I’m not happy with Design Vitality’s decision to put off the deadline again. Neena advised me to contact them, so I left a comment, and it’s been ignored.

However, all is not lost I have a plan which I’ll reveal very soon, which has the potential to be even better than winning the competition!

Better go. Have a happy first day of this final month!