Wow.
I have been a very happy httpme customer for a couple of years and *love* *love* *love* their service after several hosting attempts elsewhere. But when I saw Aussie Bob had started a new service, after leaving httpme on good terms (important to me), and the new service was an Oz business and billed in AU$ - and was enough cheaper to make a switch worthwhile - I hesitantly decided to make the jump. (After all, if its not broke ... why fix it?).
Well, my fears were put to rest within 1/2 hour of typing in my credit card for a year's prepayment (with the 3 months free offer making that especially attractive). Bob (or one of his clones - he can't possibly be awake 24x7?), contacted me almost immediately and we moved 3 domains right away. Oh, and did I mention I was switching nameservers at the same time? No problem he said.
Those three went so smoothly, I immediately did another 2. And then the next morning, kicked off 2 more critical domains.
We did hit our first glitch with one domain that had a long and varied history of additions and deletions. None of the mail forwards moved over, despite a couple of attempts by "Bob". In hindsight, I think the subdomain/parking was a bit messed up as I had to add/delete a couple of parked domains to make them disappear as an option in the email forwarding menus.
And the amount of effort for me, apart from lodging the requests and tweaking NS records at my registrar (only because I was changing nameservers)? None. Hassle? None. Responsiveness to my nervous questions when propagation delays caused some initially inconsistent results? Excellent.
So now I have 3 domains to go (its been a great spring cleaning exercise I must add!) that are waiting on my clients getting organized.
Why are Dotable (and httpme) SO much better?
Because everything just keeps working. All the time. Nothing changes. No upgrades happen that break anything. Email always arrives.
I've been with MUCH cheaper services where I pay less in a year than I do each month and the hassle saved in one client call is worth it. At least once a month on the other services, something would go wrong. Nothing major. Nothing critical (well except one time when they went offline for 2 days). But something that would have me urgently troubleshooting for 30-60 minutes to work it out.
None of that happens with Aussie Bob's hosting. And I *love* that!
PS: The server is a bit faster than httpme. Not sure why, but general cpanel admin is snappier and the sites themselves respond faster. Possibly because my sites use a fair bit of php and mysql? Who cares - it just works!
