I have been hosting sites with the same hosting company for a long time. Yesterday I was lured into another hosting company by their fancy website.  I have been using Aplus.net and I always recommend them to my customers. This fancy company that I was lured into, will remain unnamed because I didn't give them much of a chance.

I decided to give them a try because they promised 1-click Drupal installations and some other fancy features. They also had a control panel that made the Aplus.net control panel look like a kids game.

Little did I know, that was all they really had going for them. All I was going to do was transfer Supportus Maximus Computer Support and Web Design over and this blog with it. First of all the Drupal installation I use for this blog is attached to a MySQL database where it keeps all the important data, like this post right here. 

What I didn't realize, but now I do, is that when these companies make these installations, one-click, meaning you just have to push a button on the control panel to install it, they are often several versions behind. So when I tried to transfer my site content database over it didn't work with the Drupal installation.

I use a program called Navicat to manage my databases from the desktop. It also allows me to transfer over databases from one server to another quite easily. I didn't this and my blog never came up. I then attempted to upgrade Drupal. That was a nightmare as well. My final attempt was to start from scratch and do the install myself.

There were other things going on that were irritating, such as long convoluted passwords for every little thing, surly local help desk people (Aplus has obviously out-sourced alot of their help desk, but these people are good, and extra-confusing database names.

After wasting almost an entire day on a project that was just really an experiment, I realized, "Wait a minute, why don't I just go back to my original hosting plan?" So here I am back with Aplus.net. They might not have a sexy website, but it works.

Granted, I am used them and that makes it easier for me to navigate their site, but I really think I got extremely lucky when I picked hosting plans back before the turn of the century.