In January of this year, HRV Health migrated to a new Internet hosting company. This change became necessary due to the poor service we were receiving from Hostgator, our former hosting provider.
It started on Sunday 23 October 2022. We were running a query that normally takes 11 seconds. This time it had not completed after five minutes. Assuming that there was maintenance work being performed on the server, we let it go. The next day, a Monday, the same thing happened again, and then the HRV Health website went down completely.
We sent in a support request, and got an almost instantaneous response that we needed to upgrade our service to solve the problem.
Imagine that you were having problems with your car, and the dealer says, “it’s the car you bought, you need a more expensive model”.
So we escalated the request, and discovered that other clients were having the same problem. They promised that it would be fixed. It was not.
This time, they told us that we need to prove that there was a problem. So we did. We wrote a program that tested the service we were getting, and then compared it using the same test on the same data with another service provider. Here are the results:
| Web host | Worst performance | Best performance | Average performance |
| Accuwebhosting | 1 | 0 | 0.6 |
| Ultahost | 16 | 0 | 1.4 |
| HostPapa | 17 | 15 | 15.7 |
| Hostgator | 113 | 24 | 59.4 |
When we sent Hostgator the results of our tests, they told us that the case was closed, but they would reopen it.
When they did, they discovered that there was indeed a problem, and they said that they had fix it. The test results had moved from 85 seconds an average to 29. Still way above the 11 seconds we were getting before the problems started. On the alternate service provider, it was running at 16 seconds.
We had no alternative but to move service providers.
The migration proved to be anything but simple.
Our new service provider, Accuwebhosting, proved unable set up up the mail server, and when we insisted that they were obligated to do so in terms of the service contract, they cancelled the service, in breach of the agreement.
So we migrated again.
Ultahost, our new service provider has proven to be the opposite of everything we had experienced to that point. They set up the server, and the email server, and assisted with the migration quickly and efficiently, making the process as simple as we had originally expected it to be.
We hope that our users are as happy with the improved performance as we are.
