4 replies to this topic

[Elle Bee]

Hello, everyone - newbie here. I just sent an email to support about this, and would love to get forum members' thoughts as well.

Yesterday I signed up for the Medium shared hosting plan. I'm DELIGHTED to be part of the ASO family after two years with my previous hosting company (not to name names, but its initials start with "Hostmonster"). Anyway...

Now I'm wondering if maybe I should have chosen the small Business Cloud plan instead. Some background info:

I have two WordPress sites that I'll be running as Addon domains. One is brand new, and both are still in active development with very little traffic at this point. One of the sites will feature lots of images, and will be fairly complex in terms of dynamically generated content as well. I'll post a link after I finish migrating the existing content and get caching set up again.

While the Medium shared plan seems more than adequate for right now, I also know I'll eventually want/need the Business Cloud service and the SSL certificate. I prefer not to spend more than necessary at this early stage, but I don't want to be penny wise and pound foolish, either. So it seems to me that the real question I need to be asking is how painful will it be to upgrade later?

I'd love to hear your comments and advice.

Edited by Elle Bee, 19 June 2012 - 09:15 PM.

[davidatfuzzylime]

Welcome!

Jumping from Shared to Cloud is a bit more complicated than a normal upgrade as (I'd imagine) you'll need to move server. But the good news is that the techs at ASO are awesome and will probably be able to do it all for you - you might have a couple of hours of having to make your sites read-only so people aren't commenting on the "old" one but that should be pretty much the only inconvenience. I've moved all around different types of ASO servers (small shared to big shared to business shared to VPS and Cloud) and it's always been pretty much entirely painless. Can't think of anyone who'd make it easier.

[IBBoard]

Yeah, moving between servers needs more consideration than upgrading between the levels within a plan, but it shouldn't be too much trouble.

Upgrading between packages (if, for example, you're just hitting disk space or bandwidth limits) is just a case of emailing Billing. They'll increase the quotas on your account and invoice you for the difference in price for the remainder of your contract.

Upgrading between different types of package (like Shared to Cloud VPS) does need a bit more thought, as David said. Since both accounts use cPanel then the Techs should be able to use the built-in features to do a mass transfer for you. If you've got user-generated content (such as comments on a blog) then you'll need to disable them just before the move. This will stop new data collecting on the old server. Once the site is set up on the new server then you'll need to change the DNS records (unless you use the ASO name servers, at which point I think the techs should be able to do it for you). When this happens then it takes up to about 72hrs for the various ISPs around the world to realise your site has moved, but most do it in about 4 hours. During that period you'll get people still hitting the old site, but as it is locked down then it isn't a problem.

I hope that helps and all makes sense

[Orangie]

To my best experiencing working in stages is always the best way.
It's was a wise decision moving to shared hosting, see that everything works, and then you can take your time considering cloud plans. Anyway, I think it would be much easier to do share-> cloud inside the same hosting provider than to do it between two different providers.

[joeychgo]

I started with a small shared plan -- went to a bigger one, then a vps. Today I ahve several dedicated servers. ASO took good care of me all along the way