Choosing your hosting provider

I have been using Siteground.com as my one and only hosting provider since last year. I was fed up with BraveNet which I used for almost 1.5 years. As a matter of fact my friend used to use it. But when he had no use of it, he handed it over to me. It cost about $110 per year for hosting and few more bucks for maintaining my domain name jayeshkawli.com.

I would say their service was OK. But connection kept dropping continuously. There was no support for https without paying hefty fee. No git control, no SSDs, no advanced geeky features as SiteGround offers. Their console and other services were not user friendly at all. I don't know how much time I spent figuring out how to use them. On the top of it, when I suffered any billing or technical issue they would redirect me to user forums which needless to say quite deserted. Either take care of your own problem or desperately try on their forum to find someone.

Eventually you will get one if you are quite lucky. But there was no guarantee that he would solve your issue. Besides, billing issues could not be solved on the forum

Eventually I got fed up with them. I spent couple of months trying to find good hosting provider. By good I mean the one who is good and reasonable in terms of cost and other expenses.

Finally by the end of December - 2014, I came to know about SiteGround through one of the blog posts. They praised them very well. They were developer friendly and had all the features I was looking for. The most positive point was they had online chat service. Not only for existing customers but for people who want to become member.

This is great, cause I usually see that businesses keep chat option open only for existing members. If you are a new member and want to ask a peculiar question, it's not really quick and easy to get answer for

I talked to their customer representative. It was Saturday morning and chat was still live. Like an amateur in hosting services, I had too many questions. BraveNet actually made me wary about services and the customer support. We were chatting for almost 2 hours. Needless to say, I was not only convinced about their service but I immediately picked up my card and purchased the service + domain name for a year for around $130. Thankfully they had 60% discount for new users. It was nice deal. These people also took care of moving all my content and domain name from BraveNet to their own hosting environment.

It was painless process and hardly took couple of days to set everything up.

And did I tell you I had great one year with them. In fact I purchased plan for two more year with 20% discount and it cost only $190 for hosting and $30 for domain name.

I almost forgot to mention it, but since my previous GoGeek account was too expensive to maintain without 60% discount in the second year, I downgraded my service to StartUp plan which is the most basic and cheap.

I do not really have any regrets about this downgrade, since as mentioned on the Comparison Page there are no services on GrowBig and GoGeek account which I need and unavailable on StartUp account.

So, my suggestion is that if you are looking for a new hosting provider please try out SiteGround for a year with 60% discount. You can also find more holiday deals on their website. Don't worry about payment. You can try them for 30 days with money back guarantee. You can always switch the service off within those 30 days.

I am happy for another reason too since plan offers 10GB of storage on hosting server. Hopefully I may be able to migrate all my blogs from Ghost on my own server and then redirect users directly to the blog. It will save me $10/Month as a hosting cost of Ghost. Hopefully I won't be too lazy to do all the heavy lifting. Since I already made a payment for next month. I will begin the moving next month onwards with the challenge of keeping my blog up and running