We survived the latest Head for Points hosting switch

We moved HfP to a new server on Friday.  Everything seems to have gone to plan, I’m pleased to say.  The new set up is certainly not cheap but, for the first time ever, we are often showing home page load times of under 1 second on Pingdom.  Our ‘50% less expensive’ existing hosting was generally around 1.7 seconds and the super-cheap hosting we had before that was around 2.5 seconds.

I won’t knock super-cheap hosting though.  When HfP hit 1m page views per month it was still running happily on a £7 per month GoDaddy contract!  Our biggest issue with them was downtime, which was costing us more money in lost advertising etc than we were saving.  In the year after we traded up we never had any downtime that I noticed.  We only had to switch again because our host was acquired and the buyer decided to close this division down.

If you do see any issues, please let me know.  The new set-up uses a cache more intensively, which for non-tech people means that the server does not recreate each page from scratch every time.  This is perfect for static sites but needs managing carefully on sites like ours where the page changes each time a comment is made.

I need to thank Neil Barrett again for the work he has done.   Neil did a full rebuild of HfP last Autumn after a malware issue and has done all of our IT work since, including this latest move – which was done with zero downtime and only nine minutes of comments lost.  If you are looking for someone to help you with WordPress then he is your man.

Neil can do non-WordPress work too – he has over 20 IT years with a particular emphasis on the troubleshooting, functionality building and security of websites.   You can get in touch with him here. As well as his bespoke consultancy services, Neil has run Enbecom since 2002 providing domains, hosting, security and marketing for websites – the more ‘off-the-shelf’ types of services.   As a gesture for HfP readers, Neil has offered 10% off domains, web hosting, SSL and marketing packages bought through the Enbecom site until 31st December 2018, including any monthly or annual renewal payments which are made before then.   Just use this discount code at checkout: HFPREADER2018.