If you are a Bloghosts customer, and have not visited Bloghosts.com in the past few days, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you have less than two months to find a new home for your site.
I was disappointed when I found this out thanks to LiL because I have been quite satisfied with Bloghosts’ service during the four short months I have been with them.
It looks like I will get a chance to test out how well Sebastian Delmont’s TypeMover plug-in works. Being the paranoid sort, I have also been making manual ftp backups of all my blog-related files every evening since I got the news.
I have already compiled a list of potential hosts (mostly culled from BlogExplosion’s directory); unfortunately, they are all a trade-off between price, blog-centric support (specifically Movable Type), cPanel availability, and perceived longevity.
I continue to be lazy: want to share the info you’ve found?
I love the internet. You never need to look things up. :>
Welcome, fellow refugee. Here is what I have found so far.
One concern I have is whether I will do the installation myself, or whether I will have the host do the installation for me. A nice thing about Bloghosts was that they took care of the MT installation, and they even did MT version upgrades upon request (plus they were just $30 a year for 100 MB storage/5 GB per mo. transfer).
Many of the remaining blog-centric hosts are in the $60-$70 per year price range, which is worth it. However, I am much more comfortable with installing and upgrading MT myself now, and may go with a cheaper, less blog-specific option.
Protagonist - their plans start out at $20/year for 50 MB storage/2 GB bandwidth, cPanel (important), MySQL support, php/cgi support, and POP3 e-mail. I would probably have to install and support Movable Type by myself, but I don’t think that would be a problem. BTW, they do free WordPress installations. They have been hosting since 2002.
Blogomania is obviously blog-centric. They start at $60 per year for 45 MB storage/ 4.5 GB bandwidth. Same features as above, more or less. They will install MT for a small fee, although they are running a “no set up fee” special this month; not sure if that includes an MT install. Big disadvantage is that they require you to transfer your domain to them or register a new one; I do not trust one company to be both my host and my registrar.
BlogMoxie are will transfer Bloghosts sites over to their servers for free, but they have only been around a year and don’t list prices on their site. They also seem to be focused more on design than hosting.
LiL mentioned that she liked the looks of DreamHost, but while they offer an insane amount of bandwidth (40 GB/mo with 80 MB storage), they are $120 per year, plus $25 setup, and they don’t offer a dedicated unique IP for your site for free. They have been around 8 years, though.
SurfSpeedy looks to offer more storage/bandwidth than I’d need (2000 MB/ 65 GB) for $66 a year. They are not blog specific. Uncertain how long they have been around.
I will update this post or create a new post if I find out anything more.
Okay, so Elise from Learning Movable Type did a huge article last month on Movable Type friendly web hosts with charts and graphs and detailed surveys. I definitely need to add her back into my blog surf rotation. This weekend, I will take the plunge and sign up with a new host; however, I plan on doing the migration myself; I do not trust anyone else.
Total Choice Hosting, one of Elise’s top two recommendations, is looking like the front-runner. I have already received e-mail back from one of their tech support people.
The large size of the company (I’m wary about the smaller hosts after Bloghost’s collapse), the free upgrade to the the next plan up, the offer to copy my site over for free, and the price ($44 for one year) are working very strongly in their favor.
At some point in the next couple of days, there will be two versions of notMike.com on two different servers, so that I do not suffer any downtime as my nameserver change propagates.
I was also hosted by bloghosts, and moved my sites to TotalChoice Hosting (http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/). They have a special offer for bloghosts victims, and will move your whole account to their servers for you. Whatever host you choose, just make sure they also use cPanel, since that will allow them to copy your whole site, mail and all your account settings with a single script. TCH had my site up and running within 30 minutes after submitting a support ticket!
cPanel is an amazing piece of software. I submitted my support ticket for TCH to transfer over my site at 2:30 AM (night time support is understandably a bit slower, I am guessing). The only disadvantage that I can see so far is that I will have to pay extra if I want a dedicated IP versus a shared IP; no word back yet on what the cost for that is.
Oh. Hmm. How do you avoid the downtime issue? Am I missing something? Doesn’t it take (some amount of time) for DNS to propagate?
Here is where it gets dicey because after they do the cPanel copy, you will have two versions of your site.
(I still do not have two copies because the Bloghosts server was having trouble while TCH was trying to run the script to copy my site, so they will have to try again later.)
LiL’s nameserver transfer took about a day and a half to propagate, some servers quicker than others.
So you could either temporarily make posts to both sites, and then copy over comments manually. Or you could set up an automatic redirect from Bloghosts to your new host. If you are comfortable with the Redirect feature of cPanel, it is best to do it here.
The quick and dirty method is to make an FTP connection to your old site and rename index.html to something like index_old. Then create a blank html file named index.html that includes the refresh tag with the IP address of your new site (example below).
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://12.345.678.123/~newaccount/" />
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
I switched to www.livingdot.com - AMAZING host. They have some special deals for bloghosts refugees.
Not sure if you’ve already moved, but I thought I would throw my hat in the ring if you’re still looking for a host. To answer your initial “questions” posted here - price is comparable to other plans out there, blog-centric support (specifically Movable Type) has been our primary focus from day 1 (which was in 2002), cPanel availability - check, and perceived longevity - Blogomania is my full time job. In addition, I have a strong support team. I’ve been doing this for close to 3 years, and have no intention of stopping any time soon.
Sorry to slightly spam you, just trying to look out for the bloghost refugees. Matter of fact, Blogomania is offering the first month free for bloghost clients, and we’ve been handling site migrations for them also. (The cPanel migration functionality is not working on the bloghost server, so it is a slightly manual process.)
Hope that helps you out!
Christine, I went with TotalChoice Hosting a couple of weeks ago.
However, my site has been getting Google hits for blog-hosting-related terms ever since Bloghosts’ premature death, so if anyone else out there still needs a host, take a look at Blogomania.
The more options we have for blog-aware hosts, the better.