I recently moved to a new web host. I switched from U.S. based GeekGhost to Canadian based CanSpace for sites I operate, including RobertThivierge.com. The move was necessitated by the increasingly poor performance of GeekGhost. It became more and more common for a site to go offline. I believe GeekGhost’s laggy and spotty performance was a major reason the exclusion of many pages from Google, which bots have trouble accessing. Google’s bot actually reduced its visits substantially due to the slow response. That’s done to avoid overloading a low powered server.
So far, the transition has gone quite well. CanSpace was good about answering questions in advance of the switch and were quick to respond to my single support ticket, which was to get SSL setup on all my domains.
I haven’t been on CanSpace long enough to give a proper review, but so far, they seem quite good and reliable. I opted for their Professional Shared Hosting plan, which includes free SSL certificates on all domains hosted with them. They automatically setup and renew the SSL certificates, which is what GeekGhost did. Both are much better than GoDaddy, an older host, which intentionally avoids this feature that’s cheap to implement, in favour of a labour intensive approach, which lets them upsell customers SSL certificates and their management.
For future cases of new hosts, a good tip is to change the TTL (Time-to-live) setting in the DNS settings for domains, so that changes are reflected quicker across the web. Next, I think it’s good to pick a free public DNS Name Server, like Google’s. Google’s Name Server (8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4) will let you flush the dns cache for a domain. So, by doing that, and also removing any cache locally, I can more quickly the results of loading pages from the new host.