Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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Help: need to escape from intractably useless web host

For the last few years, I’ve been renting a virtual server from 5 Quid Hosts. I use this to host two sites with moderate traffic (Discover Society and Sociological Imagination) as well as a series of much smaller sites with negligible traffic. The performance started to diminish around a year ago and it’s been getting progressively worse. The extremely responsive technical support provide the same response each time I e-mail to say that a website is offline. The situation is becoming ridiculous and I need to overcome my inertia. I’ve been unable to access sociologicalimagination.org for days and all the technical support tell me is that I should install a profiler plug in so I can diagnose what the problem is.

At present I’m paying £35 a month, as well as subscription to Max CDN in order to try to improve performance. I regularly find myself responding to ad hoc problems with the sites, trying to diagnose issues that I don’t really understand and generally having surprisingly large amounts of time and energy taken up by this. It’s becoming immensely tedious and I’m not sure what to do about it. Discover Society will (eventually) move on to its own server. I’m not really sure what to do with the Campaign for the Public University site or the other smaller sites.

The main issue is Sociological Imagination though. Until the recent imposition of the stupid ‘new’ wordpress let me newly appreciative of controlling your own installation, it struck me that my wordpress.com installation of this blog was the only hosting experience I’ve had that was entirely unproblematic. Is there a way to move a privately hosted wordpress site back to wordpress.com?  Would this be a bad idea? Alternatively, could anyone recommend private hosts that, to put it bluntly, aren’t shit? Is there any way to move wordpress sites across en masse from one server to another or would I have to do this one by one? 

My dilemma at the moment is that I’m paying £40+ a month for a service that is appreciably worse than what I get for $99 a year via public WordPress. Even if I had to move all the sites (as well as the two big ones, at least three others can’t be dispensed with) across to wordpress.com it would seem appealing at the moment. In essence, I want to be able to forget about the mechanics of hosting a blog and just get on with blogging.

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