During it's early development Under One Roof was hidden on the Internet and only accessible by five people, the only ones who knew where it was. When it was ready to launch Under One Roof needed a home of it's own, so began the search for a host.
We wanted a UK host because we are a UK based website with content that's only relevant to a portion of the UK population. Of all the thousands of hosts we could have chosen, one was picked and a hosting account set up ready for the launch.
It wasn't long before it became apparent that we needed to move Under One Roof to another host. The site was running very slowly, database connection errors were occurring daily and the in-house control panel was amateurish.
Fortunately we were not tied into an annual contract and so after just 3 months, we moved the site to it's second host, where it stayed for a year.
During that year the hosts suspended the site twice for spurious reasons and it was offline for several hours because their power supply back-up system failed. Once more Under One Roof needed a new home.
We found our current host after asking on the SMF forum if anyone could recommend a decent UK host that could handle a forum based website. SMF is the software we use for the council house adverts.
A small Canadian company, Monte Carlo Hosting (MCH), contacted us offering their services. We had reservations about hosting Under One Roof across the Atlantic, mainly speed. MCH convinced us that it would not be a problem and that they had "blisteringly fast" servers which were optimized for SMF.
Searching the web, we couldn't find anything negative about MCH, only praise. So thinking it couldn't be any worse than the UK hosts we'd used, the site moved to it's third host.
We are still with MCH where we intend to stay. Their servers are "blisteringly fast" and they are a brilliant company to work with. Any issues we have are dealt with straight away, despite the time difference. Any slowing of the server is also dealt with immediately, usually before we've even noticed it.
Under One Roof finally found a home, a pity we had to go to Canada to find it.
