Yesterday ... the entire day was spent moving our website from Domains Priced Right to our new host HostMonster. As soon as I started calling for support purposes, the little doubt I had left in my mind about the move was swept away. Multiple support phone calls to Domains Priced Right's long distance number were answered in an average of 6-8 minutes. Repeated calls to HostMonster's toll free number were answered in an average of 1-2 minutes.
The main reason we decided to make the switch was that our payment gateway provider First Data needs port 1109 opened for the web server to establish a connection and transmit the credit card transaction data such as card number, CVV code, and expiration date to First Data. Domains Priced Right salespeople stated we needed to upgrade to a more costly solution in order to have this port open. HostMonster sales said all that's needed is for us to purchase a static IP address and then they will open port 1109 for us. This solution resulted in only approximately a 50% increase in monthly costs, whereas Domains Priced Right's solution would result in approximately a 700% increase in monthly costs!!
Unfortunately during the transfer process I missed a crucial step to ensure greater uptime. Best practice dictates that you should change your DNS servers to your new host's addresses before you initiate the domain registrar transfer. One step missed equals an important lesson learned and now possibly up to a week of unreliable DNS info which may cause service interruption!! So... anyone who is thinking about jumping ship from one host to another please learn from my mistake!
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