I have used external hosting providers before, but that was back in the 90′s, and a lot has changed since then. Try doing research on the shared hosting providers and you will find that most of them own the sites that praise them or rank them well. Be very careful of reviews and make sure they are from reputable establishments. Also, if you are reading discussion postings, check on the background of the reviewer. The one thing that caught my eye right away was that most reviewers who recommended hosting services registered for the discussion board on the same day that they posted their recommendation. Major red flag there.

Ruling out all the noise, I had eventually narrowed my field down to two candidates, both of whom looked reputable and offered decent value for their services. The services were from pairLite, and Liquidhost. However, when I started looking into their specific abilities to host WordPress sites, I found something interesting. WordPress has a preferred relationship with HostICan for really simple WordPress hosting, but their service really offers full web hosting for two domains and secure IMAP. They met my full requirement list at less than half the monthly price of the other two services, but I was a bit concerned because their price seemed too good to be true though. I continued my research and found nothing but praise for their services though and I generally trust the WordPress community.

So, last week I moved this domain to their servers and everything went really well. I decided to rebuild from scratch and only imported a few posts from XML, so there was no real migration involved. However, this weekend, I moved my main domain with email, static web, and full WordPress migration over, and it too was seamless. During the process I had to contact support twice to get some information. Both times, the issue was resolved in under an hour. One of the issues was getting SSH access so that I could work at the command line. They do charge a small fee to add this service, but I think it is reasonable. I won’t quote prices here because they could change any time. Let me just say that I think the value of the HostICan service is very high and the price is very low. I am a happy customer who will be shutting down the server in the basement this week.

Some notes: I am not affiliated with HostICan, other than being a recent and satisfied customer. Please note the date on this post. If you are reading this some time far after the post date, you should check to see if I have updated my opinion by clicking on the hostican tag on this site. I don’t anticipate a change in attitude, but you never know, companies change, get bought out, etc.