Website Successfully Migrated

Over the past year the club has slowly moved to a new web host. Parts of the internet services were migrated across with minimal interruption and inconvenience to our users. New services were added. The migration of the full website, and the software that runs it, finally completes this staged migration.

Reasons for the migration are as follows -

• The old webhosting company had some big problems a year or so ago, as part of a botched migration. Although the issues exposed via those mistakes were a serious concern, the response to the problems (inadequate communication with customers, apparent PR denial, etc) was no way to respond or deal with affected customers. It's a pattern we'd like to avoid in the future.


• Support - the company made a big deal of fast support.
  Too often this did not remotely meet expectation. The best and worst was phone support. This was almost always excellent *IF* you could get through to it (next to impossible). Other forms of support were often less than satisfactory. Much of the need for support was consequent to issues encountered in the months following their migration problems.


• Costs
  • Our gallery software was no longer supported after their migration. Instead we needed to upgrade to a new version which required an extra database (+$15/year)
  • The cost of the account was considerably greater than competitors, who offered similar packages (in some ways more), with more databases - all of which cost little more than the extra $15 asked for the database.

We regret this move from a company that hosted our site for three years. However, the technical "safety" (security & integrity) of our hosted data; concern as to whether we will be properly informed of potential and actual changes, problems, and their solutions in the future (i.e. a loss of trust); and the strong need for cost savings (after the effects of the Howard Government's introduction of voluntary student unionism on the club's bottom line); have conspired to push the club to try a new web hosting company. So far the experience is good.