Hosting Matters

I’ve just finished migrating Windypundit to a new hosting service. I changed the DNS nameserver pointers to use the new hosting provider, so as soon as that propagates out, everyone will find me here. If you can read this, it already works for you.

For the last few years, I’ve been using 2MHost to host Windypundit. I picked them originally because they’re a Movable Type Hosting Partner. If you’re thinking of trying the MovableType blogging engine, the Hosting Partner approach works pretty well. You get all the flexibility that comes with using Movable Type, but the hosting service does the heavy lifting of installing and upgrading Movable Type.

So why did I switch? Well, one of the advantages of using a Movable Type Hosting Partner is that you don’t have to pay for a Movable Type license. The Hosting Partner has one, and you get to use theirs.

However, with the recent version 3.3 release, Movable Type went back to giving a free license to non-commercial bloggers, so I don’t have to worry about the cost anymore.

Also, 2MHost wasn’t the most reliable host, and their customer service wasn’t all that great. That’s not a knock on 2MHost. They’re a discount hosting service, and for $6.95/month they provided much better service and uptime than I expected.

Now that I’m earning enough in ad revenue to cover reasonable hosting costs, I’ve moved to Hosting Matters, which is the service that all the big dogs are using.

While I was at it, I upgraded to version 3.3 of Movable Type, which meant that I didn’t just copy the database over, I had to import all the templates by hand and merge my customizations into the new templates. I’m not quite done with that. If you post a comment or try the search box, you’ll still get the Movable Type default page design.