Cheaper hosting fees and free website migration lured me from GoDaddy to Hostgator. But in a span of 1 week, I moved between 3 different hosting providers. Fingers crossed, I will be staying with Bluehost for the foreseeable future.
What started as a simple proposition of pain-free migration from GoDaddy ultimately blossomed into mammoth tasks of backups, restoration and plenty of trial and error with server settings. Signing up with Hostgator was the easy part. After choosing the hosting plan and making payment, I completed an online form providing Hostgator with the relevant user names and passwords at GoDaddy to enable their migration team to start the process. What I did not realise is the process could take up to 72 hours since it is a “free service”. 36 hours into the wait, I decided to have a go at the migration myself. After minor headwinds, I completed the entire migration in 2 hours and arranged for my hosting account at GoDaddy to be terminated.
4 days after the initial sign up, I received a cryptic email from Hostgator asking me to provide a scanned copy of a Photo ID such as a passport, or driver’s license. In addition to a photo ID, I was asked to include a scanned copy of the credit card that was used in my account purchase. Suspecting that it could be a scam, I tried logging into Hostgator but discovered that my account had been suspended. I no longer had access to my files and my site was redirected to a landing page. Thankfully this is a personal blog but it would be disastrous if it is a business site. After contacting customer service by telephone, I was told that there are alternative verification methods but I had to reply to the original email as they could not assist me over the telephone. The agent claims that it is within their Terms of Service that they could suspend any site on their server at any point in time if they determine the account to be of high risk. Personally I have no objections in client identification but it should be performed at the outset and for existing customers, Hostgator should have at least provided a grace period before suspending access. I followed the instructions of the agent but 24 hours later have yet to receive a response1.
Armed with the original backup files, I migrated this site to Bluehost. Both Hostgator and Bluehost offer cPanel, FTP access and MySQL. With minor tweaks to the server settings, I completed the migration in 45 minutes and bid goodbye to Hostgator.
The lesson from this episode is always to maintain a copy of backup files on the local drive. I would have been held hostage by Hostgator otherwise.
1Update – Hostgator did send a reply 36 hours later but not offer an alternative method of authentication.