I feel badly posting this info, also, but I just want to help, because I took great care with my move and felt like I was starting from zero knowledge. I've felt like part of a family at FQ for ~18 years, but I've known for a while that I needed to make a change. I do feel like I'm betraying family, and would feel awful if I felt I was doing anything to further hurt the situation and great people at FQ. The recent issues only accelerated my planned move by a month or two. This is how I found my new provider:
At the top of my criteria were A) being highly rated, reliable, and low cost (of course), B) storage space allowance that I won't outgrow, and C) a focus on email hosting because I have ~4GB of primary email accounts that are the most important for me. I also thought it would be good if the new host uses the standard CPanel interface, so future host switching would be more seamlessly switchable. For my 25 years of owning domains, I've been on only one other small company before FQ, and I did NOT want to move to a large company like GoDaddy or the Endurance brands (
endurance.com/our-brands). My short list came down to
DreamHost.com,
A2Hosting.com,
Hostinger.com, and
WebHostingHub.com. I chose
A2Hosting.com because their storage space initial threshold limit is 50GB, they're very highly rated all around, have phone tech support and co-located data centers. I prepaid for 3 years for $143, and after three years, the renewal is notably higher than that promo rate, but if things keep going the way they are, I’ll have no qualms paying the renewal rate at that time.
I initially moved all my domains to A2 except the primary domain, so I could comfortably get my new environment up and configured before moving over my mission-critical domain. I kept NetSol.com as my registrar, and only had to update DNS records, but A2 have registrar services that you can transfer into, as well. It took me about 3 weeks from when I opened the account, until I had everything fully migrated, verified, and configured like I wanted, which I don't think is terrible considering that I have a 'day job' and a family. The tech support has been really great over the past month as I got everything going – same caliber as FQ, and nice to have the phone support option for the one time I used it. Also, I will say that the A2 email platform (and web mail interface) is very, very fast -- which is what I was primarily hoping for, after having so much trouble with mail/questmail as my email account grew -- and the A2 mail platform is not fazed in the least with my large mail account. The CPanel setup is good once you learn the terminology and where everything is, and I love that the server automatically sets up the https/SSL/TLS certificates so there are no security warning issues accessing the domains or email (I apparently have 101 auto-renewing certificates across my 13 domains – this didn’t exist as a concern 18 years ago).
Here are some of my research links that I used:
https://www.quicksprout.com/web-hosting-uptime/
https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best...sting-services
https://www.hostingadvice.com/best/
https://hostadvice.com/hosting-services/email-hosting/
https://www.whtop.com/best
https://hostingfacts.com/
https://www.trustpilot.com/categorie...osting_service
I will miss FQ, and had a great run except toward the end. YMMV, but I sincerely hope my story helps, and wish you all the best going forward.
Russ
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