Last weekend, I migrated my web sites and e-mail to a new shared hosting service, Canspace Solutions. My pages now load a bit faster, and the migration was painless. 

Over the past year, the performance of my old web hosting service has declined. Server response and page load time became slower. So, I finally bit the bullet and switched to a new shared hosting service. My web sites are now hosted in Canada at Canspace Solutions in Toronto. My selection was based on expectations for decent performance, decent service and decent price.

Like most people running personal blogs, shared hosting is good enough. Shared hosting means that you share a web server with a few other users. So, the hosting service needs to make sure there are enough resources on the server to accommodate multiple users. I have found that if too many users are loading down the SQL server, wait time can get quite long. That’s what was happening to me at my old host.

Migrating to Canspace Solutions was really simple. They answered my questions quickly. Once I signed up, migration worked well. They just did a backup of my old cPanel and reinstalled it on their server. It took less than a day to have the new site up and running, with no downtime. Migration included my e-mail as well as the blogs.

Another benefit with Canspace Solutions is that they are also a domain name registrar. Previously I had to renew my fallows.ca domain name myself. I combined my web hosting with name registration and saved some money, too.

We’ll see how performance holds up as we go along, but so far, so good.

Canspace Solutions – Finding Independent Reviews

When you are looking for a new web host, it is really, really hard to find independent reviews or objective information about alternatives. Almost impossible.

There are tons of “web hosting review” sites on the Internet, but almost all of them are geared to selling rather than reviewing. In some cases, the review sites are run by hosters. But, most often, they are run by bloggers who are trying to make some money off their “reviews”. The exception to this is a few magazine that do independent reviews, but they focus mainly on the bigger providers.

If you want to check the performance of a shared web host, here’s what to do. First, find a few real sites that are hosted on the service. Second, go to WebPageTest and enter the URL. WebPageTest will give you a report card on the performance, including Time To First Byte and Page Load times. This is also a good service for checking your own site and finding was to improve.

My blogs now load a few seconds faster, which what I wanted.