WTF was that?

[Beltguy]

Thanks for the info on your old and new hosting company.  Our website and forum (along with my personal websites and blogs) are currently hosted on GoDaddy.  While they have become very money hungry, the support has ALWAYS been in the USA.  The quality of the support has gone down a bit.

The other administrator has several sites on HostGator and has tried to migrate our site/forum to HostGator but has not been able to get the support he needs for the process.  I tried to move my hosting there about a month ago and they did not initiate the promised migration process.  I placed many phone calls to their support line and only got folks who were obviously off-shore.  While very polite and full of promises, nothing happened.  I cancelled my account.

I noticed this site does not yet have the free SSL yet.  I assume that you will take advantage of that offer.

BTW, thanks for all you do.  Having a bit of experience, I know how much work you have done to get us back up and running.

Jim

[Doc B.]

have had lots of problems with having to "upgrade" constantly.  Then you hit a Major Upgrade that requires a major rebuild.  And I've seen NO improvements for about all of it.

And if you try to move it to another hosting platform old stuff gets lost - images disappear, posts get truncated, etc., which you hear about for years afterwards. A few years ago my SMF forum server kept getting brought down by crawlers trying to download every photo link posted from another really big forum after they had updated their software. That forum owner was not sympathetic to resolving the issue, and the only viable solution was to turn off the ability to post linked images on my forum. Which pissed everyone off. Even if you decide to move to different forum software you will have to keep the SMF stuff as a linked archive anyway. So changing it is a tough call.

It all kind of cracks me up. I've had a forum in one form or another since 1999. And looking back over 22 years I swear 2/3 of the posts are basically the same tech support question, repeated a hundred thousand times and all answered with "reflow your solder joints." The equivalent here would be all the questions answered by "pick up a copy of the rule book."

[bobc]

I hope we never have to switch....   last I knew (during the 1and1 screwup) the forum database was 1.7 Gb, though that may be endless error messages caused by 1and1.  I do know there are about 70,000 attachments.