Our current host is getting a bit expensive so I am considering switching to an alternative host service provider. Can anyone recommend any? The best looking deal I have found is with hostingdepartment.net, which costs US$4 per month and has more than enough bandwidth, storage and other features. Has anyone had any dealings with them?

freediver wrote on Jan 4^th, 2008 at 4:58pm:

Our current host is getting a bit expensive so I am considering switching to an alternative host service provider. Can anyone recommend any? The best looking deal I have found is with hostingdepartment.net, which costs US$4 per month and has more than enough bandwidth, storage and other features. Has anyone had any dealings with them?

Nope but you don't get a lot cheaper.   Their web site looks OK.  Google them to see if anyone has had any gripes about them.

Out of interest who are you with now and what do they charge?

I'd rather not mention them until after it's all done. They could screw me round if they wanted to. Apparently that's not uncommon.

freediver wrote on Jan 4^th, 2008 at 5:30pm:

I'd rather not mention them until after it's all done. They could screw me round if they wanted to. Apparently that's not uncommon.

No worries - you do need to ensure they don't tinker with your domain name.

I'm actually planning on leaving the domain name with them. I've got about another two years before it needs renewing and from what I've read it's a good idea to have the domain registration and hosting with different people.

It's not looking good. I paid for an account on Saturday. I have submitted two 'tickets' asking when they will get the account set up. No response so far. This step should be automatic.

Stuff I learned the hard way:

http://www.ozpolitic.com/articles/starting-your-own-website.html#transferring-hosts

OzPolitic is changing hosts over the next few days. Hopefully this will be a seemless transition and you won't notice a thing. However, there could be some downtime. Also, for a period of about 48 hours some of you may view the site on the new host and some on the old host. This means you may see different things, especially on the forum. Some posts to the forum that are made on the old host may not get transferred, but I will try to correct this afterwards. I will also try to let you know whether you are viewing on the old or the new host.

I have changed the DNS settings so that you will be directed to the new host for ozpolitic. The change seemed to happen straight away for me, but it could take up to 48 hours for you to be directed to the new site. I am in the process of moving posts over to the new site now.

As posts are made to the new site, I will close the corresponding threads on the old site.

I will put a message on the home page and forum letting people know whether they are on the old or the new site.

If you want to control whether you view the old or the new site, there are two ways. You can visit the new site here:

http://66.79.164.26/~ozpolit/

or the old site here:

http://207.44.246.45/~ozpolit/

Note that if you follow any links it will take you away from there to wherever your host is being directed. You need to alter each URL directly.

Alternatively, you can change your local settings. Open your hosts file. For most windows users, this is at C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc. Open it with notepad and add the following lines:

# new:
#66.79.164.26 ozpolitic.com
#66.79.164.26 www.ozpolitic.com
# old:
#207.44.246.45 ozpolitic.com
#207.44.246.45 www.ozpolitic.com

To view the new site, remove the # symbols as follows:

# new:
66.79.164.26 ozpolitic.com
66.79.164.26 www.ozpolitic.com
# old:
#207.44.246.45 ozpolitic.com
#207.44.246.45 www.ozpolitic.com

To view the old site:

# new:
#66.79.164.26 ozpolitic.com
#66.79.164.26 www.ozpolitic.com
# old:
207.44.246.45 ozpolitic.com
207.44.246.45 www.ozpolitic.com

Make sure you delete the extra lines when you are done, or you could end up forever stuck at the old site.

The file location for other operating systems and other info can be found here:

http://kb.mediatemple.net/article.php?id=061

Just removed the global announcements and spliced them onto this thread.

The old hosting was with planet domain. They were charging about $14 per month. I think I originally went with them because they have an office in Australia and their cheapest plan isn't that bad. I did not expect the bandwidth on the site to go up so quickly.

Has anyone noticed an increase or decrease in the speed of the site since we shifted hosts?

The hostingdepartment.net website has been down for a couple of days now, which is probably a bad sign for a web host. If we go offline at some point it may be because the host has gone broke or something like that. It would probably take me a day or two to get the site relocated.

Haven't noticed any real change in speed.

Good you've warned us.