If you have had some problems accessing my blog the past few days, it’s because I’ve moved servers and the move took a while to complete.

There was nothing wrong with my old host, Singaporewebhosting. The owner provides an excellent personal touch to his service, and I really appreciate that. However, it did not offer me sufficient storage space and bandwidth. I’ve been trying to cut corners here and there to try and manage within the limits of the plan I signed up for.

I was wondering if I could get a better deal for the amount of money I paid, so I decided to shop around for a better host, and I found Hostmonster. It’s really a monster in terms of the amount of disk space and bandwidth offered. A grand total of 50 gigabytes of web storage space and 999 gigabyte of bandwidth monthly, all for USD$3.95 a month (works out to be approximately SGD$7 a month).

Sounds too good to be true? I did think that it was too good to be true, until I did some homework. I went to Google and searched for sites hosted by Hostmonster to see if the loading times were good. I tried their helpdesk, which was amazingly responsive. Tickets were responded to between 15 to 30 minutes of submission, and you get a response from a customer service officer within 5 minutes of using their LiveChat support.

I decided to give it a shot. My account was activated immediately, and within 24 hours, the nameservers completed the propagation of DNS across the internet. And yes, I got my 50 gigabytes of web storage and 999 gigabytes of bandwidth. Loading time of my webpages seemed faster than my previous host. Their customer FAQ knowledge base was also pretty well written and covered a fairly wide range of topics.

The best part, in my opinion, is that the CEO takes the lead in customer service! He has his own blog, and he’s pretty darn frank about the good and bad of his company (note that his blog talks about Bluehost, a different hosting company but Hostmonster is actually a sister company of Bluehost, and they use the same physical infrastructure). If you don’t believe me, check out this post, where he was completely upfront about the serious server problems that occured last couple of months. After reading it, I feel completely at ease with being their customer. I don’t think that it is likely that they will just disappear without a word. Great customer service culture, and certainly goes a long way to keep their existing customers!

So far, it’s been quite a good ride with them, and I hope that I will not experience any problems. I don’t think Hostmonster wants to give me any problems too, because I am pretty darn frank in what I write, good or bad. Until you hear another update from me, it’s all been good and I strongly recommend Hostmonster if you need more diskspace and bandwidth than you can ever use. :)

If you think my analysis is useful and has helped you to decide on signing up, use the link below to sign up. It won’t cost you a cent, but you’ll help me get a little cash to fund my site.