Advice please on changing my website host.

[Rhyl Lightworks]

I have been with the same hosting co. for 3 years and paying £30 per month to them (+ extras when I ask for certain things to be done). I have been advised this is far too high, and neither have I been always satisfied on the service (telephone messages and emails being unanswered unless I chase them up). After shopping around a bit, another co. has offered to provide the same service for £15 per month. I agreed to go with them and they said they required back-ups of all files, database, etc.
When I asked the present hosts to do this, they said it was 3 hours work and proposed to charge £180 for this. (The new hosting co. had estimated they may charge me about £30). What is a reasonable charge for this? If, as I suspect, £180 is somewhat taking the mickey, any advice as to what I should do?
Barrie

[peekaboo]

Your best bet is to go with a hosting company that offer a free site migration service.

I went with www.csnewmedia.co.uk they are members here and they moved over 18 sites for me and made sure they were working, top notch if you ask me, i used to spend £50 a month plus extras, but now much better value for money plus better customer service!! Honestly im a pain in the a** but they still put up with me lol.

Brett White

[RedEvo]

That's £60/hr which is the industry norm I would say.

d

[Carl-CSNM]

Hi Barrie,

We host many UKBF members, you only have to do a search for us on the forum to see the ever growing recommendations. (Thanks Brett!) :)

We also offer a free migration service which we usually carry out during the night to avoid any disruption to your site. 24/7 - 365 days a year support comes as standard with any of our hosting solutions.

What sort of website do you have? Please feel free to PM me if you have any questions or require a custom quote.

Cheers,

[falconinternetlimited]

It does sound like they are trying to fleece you. Alot of hosts do this for nothing. Every hosting customer has a right to ask for a backup of their data without being charged a fortune for a backup of their data for safe keeping.

Also - depending on what you store on your site, if you don't have any databases etc, you should be able to just FTP it off from your servers.

I suppose it would be easier if you can answer the following:

1) What are you hosting? Web site, databases etc?
2) What company are you hosting with?
3) What platform?
4) Do you have ftp?
5) Do you have a control panel access

That should help ascertain if they are playing silly games with you, and whether or not you could simply do it yourself.

Rupert

[fxdigital]

The rate seems about right… the time frame however seems excessive… three hours is an awful long time… unless you have a monster site it should take anything over thirty minutes… which normally translates to one hour billable. The problem you have is that this company has the power… you are leaving, you don’t have a copy of your website… so you’ll most likely end up paying whatever they suggest…

Steve Cartwright
FX Digital Pty Ltd
website-designs.com