Adventures in Site Migration: Finding a Site

Data security has recently become an important topic, particularly ensuring your data is stored in your own country. As a Canadian photographer, I decided to move my web site from the US-based service Smugmug to a Canadian server.

The transition proved to be… challenging.

Over the next few posts, I will document this adventure. Helpfully you can learn from my mistakes. In this post, I will focus how I settled on the provider where you’re reading this post.

A bit of History (Yes, I’m old)

I started working with HTML in the early 1990s and was first introduced to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) through Microsoft FrontPage not long after it was released in 1995. As an early WYSIWYG editor it… worked. But the CSS generated was bloated so I abandoned it in favour of writing HTML documents by hand.

While I haven’t worked in javascript, I do have a doctorate in Electrical Engineering (yes, I’m a doctor, just not THAT kind) and had taught Java programming at the university level.

All this being said, I was aware from a preliminary look that there was no web site provider in Canada that offered the design simplicity of Smugmug or Squarespace. If I wanted to keep everything in Canada, I would be creating the new web site by hand.

Finding a Provider

Before migrating to a new site, I first needed to find a place to go. Fortunately my day job is being a patent examiner, so searching is a skill I’ve honed for the past few years.

I really useful resource was a Google Docs spreadsheet that listed Canadian web hosts and information about what they offer. The site lists 6 different providers and different plan options for each. I needed criteria do make my decision.

As a photographer, I needed to be able to sell digital prints, so I needed eCommerce support and lots of storage (ideally unlimited). Much of my fine-art work involves nudes so I needed a provider that would be comfortable with the images I sell.

Using this criteria, I noted two providers that offered unlimited storage:

• Funio based in Québec offered an Unlimited web-hosting plan that costs about $20CDN/month, with an introductory offer of about $11CDN/month for the first year. It offers a site builder and eCommerce, and domain hosting is included in the price.
• Web Hosting Canada offered a Pro plan for about $14CDN/month, with an introductory plan of about $4CDN/month. Like Funio, it includes domain hosting in the price, and provides a site builder.

HostPapa also offered an unlimited storage tier as an Elite plan at about $28CDN/month and is used by some Canadian photographers. StormWeb’s unlimited storage offering was the Enterprise plan was about $23CDN/month on servers located in Vancouver.

All of these sites provided SSL certificates (essential for eCommerce sites), some included in the price (such as StormWeb) and others as an additional charge (such as Web Hosting Canada).

All offered multiple email addresses, which is useful to isolate different types of messages (sales, invoicing, inquiries, etc.).

Selecting a Provider

In the end, I went with the lowest regular monthly charge that had positive interactions with customer support. Your needs may be different so don’t take my decision as best for you. It may not have even been best for me, but with my GoDaddy and Smugmug renewals coming due, I had to make a choice.

Now we theoretically have a place to move my website to, and a place to maintain my already-existing domain name. In the next post we’ll see how easy (or not) it was in practice.