A couple of years ago, I made a major move from Hostgator to Media Temple for all my client critical websites, including this website. At the time, my move was in reaction to unfortunate circumstances, so my selection of host was done under duress. Thank goodness I found Media Temple, and it served me very well. But there was one problem.
The cost.
I only have one client that needed the resiliency provided by Media Temple, so paying the amount I was paying monthly for all the other non-revenue-generating sites was not prudent – I ended up keeping the majority of the sites at Hostgator.
Unfortunately, that meant that for the past 18 months, I have actually had two hosts and paid two hosting fees – not cool. Since I was focused on a platform-building project that was centered around editing a book, I did not have as much focus on my website hosting set-up and I have paid for it over that time.
Earlier this year, through my usual blog reading, I stumbled upon a host that I have completely fallen in love with because of the simplicity of their service, affordability and superior customer service – Siteground. Once I had vetted their service, I put together a migration project plan on Trello for all the wordpress websites I manage and proceeded to procrastinate for several months without implementing it fully.
The main reason for my hesitation to complete the plan was email hosting. In the past, I have hosted my email at the same host as the WordPress website and used cPanel to manage the email accounts. The biggest problem for me with this approach is that I have to assign the passwords for the users and they can’t update them without my intervention – which inevitably requires me to know other people’s passwords.
I wanted to find a way to extract myself from the password management business for email and it was during this search that I discovered Zoho Mail – another product that I am totally in love with.
Last night, I bit the bullet and stayed up late implementing the entire migration plan – websites and emails.
I am proud to say that I can now retire both my Media Temple and Hostgator hosting accounts and consolidate all the websites on Siteground and all the mission critical email on Zoho Mail.
I will write more about what that process was like, but for now, I’m just taking a big breath of relief and looking forward to my next web designing project.
Update:
If you are interested in other alternatives to hosting email for your business in a cost-effective way, this is a great article that covers the topic comprehensively.
