changing hosting companies

After three years, Time4Learning is switching hosting companies.

We initially picked Webstream for the following reasons:
- local company at which we had contacts
- reasonable pricing
- they had both linux and windows servers
- they had both shared and dedicated servers


We had our ups and downs with Webstream. The primary reason for switching is that we want a host with 24/7 telephone & email support. Webstream has support starting at 9am on weekdays (often 9:30) and nothing guaranteed on the weekends. Given the frequent need to reboot servers, we just can't afford to wait until they get to the office. And when it goes down on Sunday, I go beserk hoping that someone will come to the office and reboot us.... Also, they are in hurricane country and have had week-long down time during the bad hurricanes (this year was good, the previous year was bad). We have had a number of system crashes and outages (2x a time) so we got motivated to look around. Another down was the fact that they gave us a dns number which many routers blocked which took me a year to figure out and caused endless embarrassments with customers. The last downer was they only had one really great tech guy. The positives were that they had one very productive great tech guy and the reasons that we started with them.

What we were looking for in a new host.
- 24/7 support - telephone & email
- shared & dedicated servers
- good reputation for reliability
- the ability to have the site mirrored elsewhere

We picked verio. This means that we switched to geotrust for our ssl certificate.

BTW - now that we are doing so well on homeschool curriculum, it's time to take a run at some other big terms: learning games, educational games, as well as some lesser terms like homeschooler and homeschooling. Plus, it's time to come up first for: second grade (actually, we're still 54th on google. uhg