Friday 28 February 2014

What are TSOHost like to buy from?

Following on from my Search for wordpress hosting I will now share the experience of signing up with them and moving my blogs over. 

I'm planning a slow migration while I learn Wordpress in more depth, figure out the plugins I want and deal with migration issues. I'll move my smaller blogs first and learn the process before attempting Colchambers because with over 500 posts I need practice beforehand.

Account Details

I went for wordpress hosting on the professional grade. The free domain name I bought was fit2thrive.co.uk

Payment

What impressed me right away was being able to pay through paypal. Services like this usually seem to use bricks and mortar credit and debit cards which are clunky. Paypal is a much nicer approach

mails of invoice and receipt came through instantly along with the new account details.

Domains

When you buy your domain you get a mail confirming your registration. It starts with

Hi Colin,
The domain name fit2thrive.co.uk has been successfully registered. The details of your domain are as follows:
I like that in the mail they make it clear you own your domain and aren't locked in. Their words are:
Advanced Users: If you have hosting elsewhere, you can point this domain elsewhere by logging into My.Tsohost.co.uk and changing the nameservers or DNS settings.
 I like companies that believe in their ability to keep your loyalty without locking you in. It's good business in my eyes.

Support

I did get a strange mail during the regeistration process.
Hi Colin,
Thank you for registering the domain name fit2thrive.co.uk with Tsohost. In order to complete the registration, the co.uk registry require additional information to be provided.
Please visit my.Tsohost to supply these details. We will then re-attempt your domain registration.
Should you have any problems or queries, please do not hesitate to contact us for assistance.
I've never had this type of email before when registering domains and there was no detail about the problem. I logged into my account and checked and found no more information. Not a good start!!!

I quickly emailed TSOHost and got a courteous and clear reply about 5 minutes later. The bad formatting of this response is down to blogger. It's part of the reason I'm leaving.
Hi Colin,
Our apologies for that.
It looks like that e-mail is in error.
I suspect there may have been a momentary delay in the registration process which caused our accounting system to log it as a failure.
The domain is registered, so that should function perfectly well once you've added that to the Hosting Account as a new site.
Please feel free to let me know if you require any further assistance.
Kind Regards,
 I can live with mistakes when I'm supported like this. So my confidence is restored.

Overall

So far I'm happy but of course that was the easy part. Next I've got to configure my account and start a migration. That's where the fun should start :-)

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