All in the name of profitability.
Stepping down from gold-level service is tough. It feels like a demotion.
That's the wrenching decision I made recently when I moved my sites off SiteGround.
I've gone through many hosting services, and SiteGround kicked the booty cheeks of all the other hosts I've used. It was by far the best I've ever used.
It just worked. And the handful of times over a nearly a decade that it didn't work, they dug in and helped me fix it quickly.
White-glove hosting costs, though
I paid over $30/month for SiteGround with a multi-year contract. With other hosts under $10/month, this was pricey. But it was worth it not to worry about my sites going down any given Wednesday.
When my renewal came up this month, I found out it would go up to $40/month for a two-year commitment.
I audibly winced when I saw this.
It took a while, but I made the sad decision to say goodbye to SiteGround. Taking a hard look, I couldn't justify the cost of the hosting for the traffic I was currently attracting to my lovely sites.
A straightforward push toward profitability
After a brief search and a positive response from the Reddit community, I chose A2 Hosting for my next web home.
I locked in $15/month for three years, a 63% savings from what I would have paid with SiteGround per month.
Another way of looking at this is money I don't need to recoup. I now need to bring in $300 less this year to be profitable. This is my primary goal for 2025.
Cadillacs are great — but so are Corollas
It's challenging not to compare SiteGround with A2. When I was migrating the sites, the A2 support took a bit longer to get back to me than SiteGround did. SiteGround had people on call 24/7 to chat. A2's technical support was through a ticketing system.
Once things were up, though, I saw little difference between the performance of my sites through A2 than I did through SiteGround.
I had to give up my Cadillac, but the Corolla I have now is reliable and gets good gas mileage. It also costs quite a bit less to maintain. And it gets me from point A to point B just fine.
If anything, the sites performed a bit better on A2.
Also, the email spam filter allows me to still get everything delivered to my inbox. (This was a minor annoyance with SiteGround. I had to have a junk folder, and it got fairly aggressive with what it deemed junk — so much so that I missed some important emails. I eventually got used to looking in two places and probably could have trained the spam filters well enough to get by.)
More tough decisions ahead …
Overall, I'm confident that I made a good, affordable choice with A2 that will keep my sites visible and save me money at the same time.
It still wasn't easy to let go of SiteGround. And it won't be easy to let go of other services I've had for a long time. But I need to take a hard look during the first part of this year in order to reduce expenses and steer my ventures toward the land of profitability.
No more coasting. I want to be boasting … about how my business has gone into the black!
Thanks for reading!
Hi, I'm John and I encourage people to work for themselves, and on themselves, every day to sleep better at night.
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(Photo by Michal Balog on Unsplash)