Moving hosting, for an established blog is not an easy thing to do mostly because it takes time to investigate and get the best web hosting deals for a fair price and believe me this is a time consuming job. For anyone that would like to choose a new hosting for their sites here are the steps I’ve thought of.

1. Reliable hosting. This was my first concern. If the site ever gets a spike in traffic I don’t want to be called by the hosting company because they’ve shut me down. That’s not the way I like to do business, so I had to seek a reliable company at first.

2. Server Specifications. Though I’m geek, servers and bandwidth are not my best qualities so I had to search for some web hosting articles and see what exactly I need. How much RAM, how much bandwidth and if it’s ok to get a shared server.

3. The price. Spending hundreds of dollars for a dedicated server wasn’t a solution and to be honest not a necessity, but I already knew what I was looking for, so I went on WebHostingGeeks to read their web hosting reviews. Though I wasn’t planning it really paid off spending the time on the site, and I learned a lot. They actually made me understand what I want. You can also try webhostingchoice.com for other reviews and costs.

4. Payment options. I don’t like giving my credit card or Paypal details to every new hosting company that pops out like mushrooms after rain. I want to make sure that those guys are at least trying to protect people’s data.

5. Customer support. Excuse me if I don’t eat PHP or Apache at breakfast, but everyone is good at something else. When it comes to server problems, I want to be sure I can rely on a person (phone, email or support ticket) that will address my problem in a timely manner. For me online chat for support is of great value, so it really counted when I made my choice.

These are the things that influenced my decision to choose a new hosting provider, but yours may be different or you could add to these.