I just recently changed hosting providers, and with all the messing around with databases and ftp, decided to upgrade wordpress right away. So I am now with Hostgator instead of Powweb, and so far I am pretty impressed. Yesterday, I thought the site had slowed down again (like it always did at Powweb), but then I did a traceroute and found out that it was my ISP that was timing out, not Hostgator. So I have three domains hosted on one account, and they all seem pretty speedy. At Powweb I had to do some .htaccess magic to make multiple domains work, and they never worked quite right. At Hostgator they have a beautiful little tool that does it all for you (with the $9/month package), and it works flawlessly. Of course, I’m sure I’ll have complaints at some point, but right now I’m really impressed. Oh yeah – those three domains are joelkoop.com/updates, where you are now, JoelKoop.com, a photography portfolio site I’m working on, and TravelsAndTrails.com, a very unfinished travel site where a person can look up places they might be interested in going or add places they’ve been to. This one is going to change significantly, so it might be unrecognizable in a couple months.

The control panel at Hostgator is not as flashy, but more powerful and easier to use than Powweb’s. Although “easier to use” doesn’t mean “easy to use”. Someone, at some point in time, needs to do usability testing on these control panels and get a designer to create them.