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If you’ve been following my blog for a while, then you have probably realized that I don’t really do well with change. At the same time, I also don’t like spending money I don’t have to. Things can get, shall we say, “interesting” when these two aspects of my personality interact. Case in point: I recently switched my website hosting to another provider.

I originally bought this domain and hosting plan for my architectural portfolio site at the end of grad school, when I realized that I was almost done and should have started looking for a job months ago. So I did my usual firehose-style research and settled on GoDaddy as one of the easier options. I didn’t need much, after all, just a place I could install WordPress and whisper from my tiny molehill “Look at me!”

And for the most part, they were pretty inoffensive. But then it came out that they supported SOPA, and I decided to take my business elsewhere. I ended up with Hostgator for my hosting, and Namecheap for my domain registration; I figured not having all my eggs in one basket wasn’t necessarily a bad idea.

And Hostgator treated me well too. Never really had any technical problems. But then I realized that the nice juicy deal I had gotten for my first year was all too temporary. How did I find this out you ask? Well, because they auto-renewed my service and I noticed a suspiciously high credit card bill that month. Of course, by the time I realized this I had already been charged for a year. But I vowed that next time, this would not happen. Next time, I would look at my options, and if I could find a better deal I would take it!

And then I promptly forgot about it.

But through sheer luck, my credit card company sent me a new card with a different number last year, so the card that Hostgator had on file was no longer valid. So rather than receiving a bill, I received a “Your bill could not be paid” notice. Well, I was not one to let this opportunity pass me by!

So I switched to TotalChoice, which ended up being about half what I paid at Hostgator. I can heartily recommend them. Their customer support response time is impeccable, and they’ve managed to fix whatever issues I’ve had promptly and permanently. The only downside to switching with an active blog is that DNS changes take a while to propagate. For those less-technical, that means that it takes a while for the Internet to know to point my URL to the new host. So there may be some service interruptions as people are sent to the old host instead.

But even with this minor headache, I’m happy to be saving myself a fair amount of money. Now if I can just prevent myself from finding any other, better deals out there I’ll be good.

(spoiler: I didn’t. Oh well, maybe next year.)