Changing Servers

Tim,

I am going to be upgrading my server that I have through GoDaddy. I am either going to upgrade to a Business Server or my own server. If I do this, what will need to be done on your end or my end to ensure a smooth transition with my website?

Edited by

GoDaddy tried to force me into changing to a business plan or a vpn plan, or removing my sy-photos and sy-upload folders. I got tired of them trying to strong-arm me into the increased costs. Take a look at Saratoga Hosting - awesome support, very reasonable prices. He also includes your security certificate and domain email for free. No more paying for every little thing. I host through him and use Amazon AWS S3 for storing my images, so much cheaper and runs better than with godaddy. I did decide to go with G-Suite though for my e-mail, you will love it as it allows multiple aliases, is domain e-mail and who will ever block google mail? My godaddy paid for e-mail plan had my emails going to spam half the time, and msn just blocking them. Crazy since the only emails I send out are gallery specific e-mails. Tell Dave that Ryan sent you if you go to Saratoga, and that I will only have good to say about him, his customer service is top notch! GoDaddy actually shut me down for refusing to remove the Sy-photos and Sy-uploads folders, even though I migrated everything to amazon and the folders were empty. They actually told me that they violated the usage agreement and shut my site down on me.

Edited Thu Mar 22, 18 6:13 PM by Ryan O

Ryan,

Thanks for the response. I have heard many talk about Saratoga. I am not a computer geek and don't know what would have to be done to switch everything to them. I have no complaints about GoDaddy and I have always had exceptional customer service with no strong-arming at all from them. I get tired of getting error messages several times when uploading images to my website. Right now I am on a shared server with many others and when I contacted GoDaddy about the errors and they looked into it, they said the cause was more than likely due to being on a shared server and doing my work during the busiest time of day. I refuse to do my work in the wee morning hours. They mentioned moving to a business server or a personal server. A personal server is out of the question for me, because like I said, I am not a computer geek. If Saratoga provides the SSL certificate for free, that would save me money.

You mentioned storing your images on Amazon S3. Is that at a cost? What would be the need to do that? I may contact Saratoga tomorrow and talk to him.

Someone also mentioned using an FTP to upload images, but again, I am not a computer geek and have no inkling on how to do that either.

Edited by

Joe,

I can agree with Ryan 100%. Saratoga Hosting is the best way to go.

Their servers are really fast, like having a VPS but it's shared. He doesn't overload his servers so you'll always have top performace at all times.

I have Saratoga Hosting for Sytist, and use G-Suite for all email. Also, Amazon S3 for all photos storage for the site. It's pennies per gigabyte vs paying for more storage through hosting. On average I'm paying about .50-2 dollars a month using Amazon S3. It can be lower depending on how many photos are uploaded.

I would give Dave a call and he will walk you through everything. Best customer service out when it comes to hosting.

Edited by

Amazon S3 is awesome, How many Gigs of photos do you have, I pay around $5 monthly for 93 current galleries. I believe in the manual are instructions to creating an s3 account, when you upload them, they automaticaaly go into s3 if you select that option.
Standard Storage
First 50 TB / Month $0.026 per GB
Next 450 TB / Month $0.025 per GB
Over 500 TB / Month $0.024 per GB

Dave at Saratoga is great, he takes care of the whole transferring, there is a fee to transfer, he will take a look at your site and provide you a quote / he was cheaper than what GoDaddy wanted in all aspects.. I used Godaddy for 10 years, started having trouble about 1 year ago, similar to you, I turned down their dedicated plan, servers and errors (including downtime) got worse and they again offered the dedicated or business plan.

Then I got the attached notice, tried explaining that this is a shopping site, not a storage site. I actually had one rep say that they simply wanted more money and that if my business had grown and I was making more, then I should expect to pay more and that why should they offer me these services on their economy plan when I could pay more, and that I needed to pay to upgrade, I was appalled, talked to a manager who said, "we will look into it" .

Long story short - you are in stage one, wait until you get the letter-email that I attached to this. Even after I removed the images, they still had an issue and said that processing the photos from the ftp, was causing instabilty to the server. I explained to them that this was necessary to catalog them in the database, otherwise 3rdd part storage was useless, they said the issue was because I was not decreasing the file siaze before uploading.

Now with s3 and saratoga, no issues. We upload, keep the originals with them on the server (so much easier for workflow as you can download the files from the invoices to quickly place print orders and make any adjustments needed.)

Edited Thu Mar 22, 18 11:01 PM by Ryan O

Hi William, I totally agree with you, my site is so much better with Dave at Saratoga. I was nervous going to a - not huge corporate company, but the best way I can explain it is like this:

Most of our photography companies are small businesses, think of the work, love, sweat and tears, and dedication we put into them. Think of Tim (Sytist) and Dave (Saratoga) like us. Now think of commercial Portrait Studios - all about the profit, no customer loyalty or loyalty to the customers - in and out as quick as possible, get the money and move on, that is many (not all) Big Hosting Companies.

Edited by

Hey Ryan, I felt the same here too. I was at Godaddy before making the switch and I'll never look back.

You couldn't have said it any better. As a small business owner, I'll always favor the smaller companies now after working with Tim and Dave. It's something that's overlooked in todays world when it comes to great customer service and great quality product.

Edited by

I will be giving Dave a call to inquire about Saratoga. I am heading into my busy time and can’t have my site down long. I store all my images on large hard drives. Do we have to store images at places like Amazon S3 in order to use Saratoga or are y’all using Amazon S3 simply as a hard drive storage space? I would love it if I could upload my images to my website without getting error messages. I am only uploading 30 images at a time and still get error messages. My image sizes for uploads are 4x6 @ 100 dpi and the files are between 140-250 mb each. I am on high speed fiber optics at 1 gig upload and 1 gig download speeds. Everything points to GoDaddy for the errors and trouble I am having.

Edited by

Joe,

It depends on how big your site it, if it's all on Amazon S3 or if you set it up and move everything over to Amazon S3, then I'm sure the switch will go faster. My site was only down for the overnight and by the morning everything was up and running.

When I was using Godaddy, I had all types of probelms. I would max out the CPU and I/O usage all the time.

Since switching to Saratoga, I upload up to 1k phtoos at a time without any issues. These are 2048px at 100% quality and full resolution photos at 100%. When checking the server status while uploading through FTP or through the site uploader, CPU and I/O never goes past 25-30%. I also have a Gigabit Connection and never have any issues.

Edited by

Here is how to move Sytist from one host/server to another:

https://www.picturespro.com/sytist-manual/installation/moving-sytist-from-one-host-to-another/

Edited by

For us, s3 was simply the cheapest, rather than going to a higher hosting plan.

Edited by

Did either of you using Gsuite have any issues setting your sytist emails up? I can not seem to get them working. Any insight?

Edited by