You’ve Been Migrated: Dealing with Your Hosting Company’s Buyout

If you operate a website and it’s a major part of your business, there are a few things you never want to see happen. You don’t want to enter your URL in your browser and see an infinitely loading white page. You never want to hear you’ve hit your bandwidth limit. And you certainly don’t want to be faced with an error message telling you that your site is offline for any reason. What do many of these issues come down to? It’s your hosting. Your service might have been disrupted, perhaps there was a malicious event, or there’s something going on at a hardware level wherever your server is located.

The bottom line is, your hosting company plays a huge part in the success of your online business. While you’ve probably considered the ramifications of what can happen when something fails or there is a technical issue, you may not have thought too much about the more behind the scenes things that can happen in the web hosting industry. You may be happy with your VPS hosting right now, but business dealings can sometimes jeopardize the quality of your service.

The Buyout

Much like with any other industry, your hosting company can sometimes be bought out and absorbed into a larger hosting company or acquired by a business that owns multiple companies. Your first question might be “Okay, well, what does that mean for me? A VPS is a VPS, right?” And the answer would be “Maybe.” It’s hard to say what exactly would happen to your quality of service if your hosting company got bought out because it’s a case by case basis.

A good analogy might be having your apartment building being bought out. Maybe nothing really changes, maybe your service calls don’t get responded to as quickly. You could also be facing a rent increase. Even worse, you may not be given an option to renew your lease or outright told you have 30 days to move out. It all depends on the company making the acquisition. If your hosting company gets bought out, you can face similar kinds of uncertainty as to the quality of the place your website calls home. Now, in most cases nothing earth shattering is going to happen to your site. But, it’s important to know what options you have and what you should do if you do receive a notice in your email saying your hosting company has been acquired by another one.

Let’s look at some of the things you should know.

Save Everything

It’s always a good idea to make sure your site and database are backed up. You should be doing regular backups anyway. In fact, your hosting company should be offering backups as part of their service plans. KnownHost does. But, once you receive that email stating your hosting company will be changing, it’s time to do your own due diligence. Because you don’t know the extent of what migration will look like as the hosting companies transfer accounts and assets, you want to do your own independent backup regardless of what your hosting company has been doing for you.

If possible, you want to do two things here. The first is to backup everything you need to a physical, local drive. This is your backup of last resort should anything happen during your possible migration. The second thing you want to do is to make another backup in a cloud location, if you use one. If you don’t, you should. Whichever cloud storage provider you end up choosing, keep your site files there as well. Now you have two backups in two completely different locations so the chance of losing anything is minimal.

Do Your Research

Doing investigative journalism on your new hosting company may not be high on your priority list, but you should certainly do some research on your potential hosting company should you choose to stay with their service. There are a few things you want to establish here. While most hosting companies that would purchase another one are legitimate and trustworthy, you still want to cover all your bases and find out as much you can about them. A good way to collect information is to seek out things like user reviews or discussion forums. There you can get a feel for any common issues or customer feedback. Feel free to ask around yourself, as well. Keep in mind that going straight to a “technical issues/service request” forum could be misleading, however. Those forums are by nature more negative sounding because it’s only for customers experiencing issues.

See What Others Have Experienced During Buyouts

You have your site backed up in multiple locations and you’ve read up on the company that is taking over your hosting. What you want to do now is see what other people have gone through during migrations. You may come across some bits of information you might never have considered. During your research phase, you probably found very general information about your new hosting company. Questions pertaining to the performance and customer service are readily available. But it’s the comparison between your current host and your new one that you’re going to be the most interested in.

Sometimes when the purchasing company owns many different smaller hosting companies, the service can suffer due to sheer volume. This isn’t always the case, or even usually, but as businesses scale the customer service can suffer. Another thing your research may show you is your experience migrating to a new service can be dictated by how the buyout is structured.

For example, if a company just buys your current company and leaves everything in place (hardware, team, etc.) nothing will really change. You could reasonably expect the same service. All that’s happened is a different structuring of where the profits go. That shouldn’t have anything to do with your site. However, let’s say you’re used to working with a small hosting company. The support you received may have been very personal and expedient. With the acquisition, your site could be transferred over to new accounts, hardware, etc. This could cause a change in site performance or the development of new issues. Price increases may follow and support may be restructured so that it’s much more remote and impersonal.

What To Do

Once you have all your information, it’s time to decide what to do with it. Do you wait it out and see if the quality remains the same? Do you just move on to another hosting company and avoid any potential ugly migrations? If you’ve been migrated and the experience has been less than ideal or you’re just ready to move on, KnownHost has you covered.

Conclusion

The team at KnownHost has years of experience dealing with situations just like yours. If you’ve found yourself in a situation where your hosting company has been bought out and you have concerns about the changes that could be coming, contact us today. We can help you find the best VPS hosting plans for your needs. With industry leading uptime, 24/7 customer support, easy setups, and complementary security measures, KnownHost is determined to provide you with a pain free migration and reliable service.