I Moved Hosting to Kualo
After over 15 years, I’ve moved my three websites and all of my email away from Pair Networks. Their new home is over at Kualo Hosting!
Why move? Well, Pair was purchased about 8 months ago and earlier this month they announced a restructuring of their product range and the change which impacted me was that they seperated out the email portion of the shared hosting package and would begin to charge for that seperately, whilst keeping the hosting portion at the same rates, just sans email.
That now separate email became the ‘Platinum Mail’ product, though it was essentially the same product which had been part of my original hosting package.
In practical terms it meant my monthly bill would have tripled in price. These sites are a small side hobby for me nowadays and that would’ve pushed the costs up to the point where the ROI would’ve made it somewhat challenging to continue.
It’s important at times like this though to take the opportunity and look around at what other options have sprung up and see how the world of hosting has been moving along.
Two things I’d been thinking about was having a host in Europe as an option (Pair is based in the US) and having one which was eco friendly.
I looked at quite a few companies, read reviews and comparisons and noted some which seemed to fit my requirements - Krystal.io seemed good, but they couldn’t do billing to Japan, EcoWebHosting as their name suggests seemed good too, but a quick look showed it to be a little convoluted and looking at reviews a recent migration hadn’t gone well, or at least not to plan, and was ongoing.
Eventually I came to Kualo so I set up a test account for one of my three current websites and went about a normal update as a test. It was quite simple to get the account set up and I also made a support ticket for a legitimate question I had which also allowed me to see how their support worked and I have to say it was very decent - a quick, friendly response which was concise and had all the information I needed. Pricing was competitive - a little more than my old Pair account, but a lot less than what I was a looking at paying if I stayed with Pair.
Kualo also uses cPanel which is standard for hosts now, although Pair had their own perfectly servicable system. The cPanel easily allows you to handle everything from setting up domains, to email and quotas, backups, databases and so on. You know, everything most of us are going to need to run a few domains and websites.
I decided to give it a go for a month (and later, a year) and began setting my sites up on Kualo.
The Website Setups
Firstly, I setup the domain spaces on Kualo - this is where I would point the nameservers once the site was set up. Kualo also recommended a service for testing, called SkipDNS which I’d not used before, but it was really helpful in simulating how the site will work once it’s using DNS correctly.
Next was setting up the first of the three sites - this site - as it’s the simplest, being statically generated locally using Hugo, and then rsync’d to the host. No real change there. It all worked as expected.
Next up was another small site I run which is created in, and uploaded from, the Publii application over SFTP. That all worked fine too, but again, it’s static on the server, so no issues really to be expected there either.
Great, two for two.
Next and finally was the bigger site, my blog, which runs on WordPress. Historically, I would upload the wordpress.org installer file, unzip it on my host and run from there, plugging in my mySQL info as it went. This time I used Kualo’s cPanel based installer. It worked very well actually, it set up the database, an admin user and all the other things. What I brought was all the upload files and an import SQL file of all my posts, exported from the old site.
It mostly worked fine too. I did have to use a small plug-in to get the system to ‘see’ everything in the upload directory and refresh the database (despite technically it looking the same) and the fact there’s a well used plug-in for this tells me it’s a relatively common scenario. After running it, everything was fine. I don’t use many plug-ins on the site - a GDPR cookie system, Yoast SEO (free version) and… that’s about it, so getting everything moving was fine. One odd thing was that my theme - Type - seemed to have lost it’s header banner images. Not a big issue though, it just took a minute to re-select them from the media library.
So there we are, all three websites all up and running and in not really much time at all.
Email has very much become an outmoded thing for most people. Everything is chat - Slack at work, and for me at least, Signal and LINE with friends. However, email is still used a lot for acknowledgements, receipts and general stuff.
For exactly these uses then, I needed to recreate my email addresses on the Kualo servers. It was actually a lot simpler than I thought it would be. I have 5 mailboxes across 3 domain names, so I had to create these with cPanel which was simple, but then I needed to create about a hundred forwarded addresses to these five, which are for the various online accounts I have. Fortunately it was easy to get a list of all of these by copy and pasting from a web page summary in Pair and put them into a .csv file using a template Kualo provide, which then was simple to import into Kualo. What could have been painful turned out to be very simple.
Kualo will help you to copy email over but I was keen to see how simple a more manual method would work, and really, it wasn’t that bad all all. Most email is IMAP based now, meaning you’re really syncing between your machine and your server, unless you’ve set things up differently, and indeed this is how Thunderbird works out of the box.
All I did then was create the Kualo based accounts for those 5 email addresses, and then copy across those emails from the ’local’ Pair accounts to the new Kualo accounts, which are then propagated back up to the server on the Kualo side. Once the DNS flips, all new mail is just added on to the Kualo side, along any mails caught in the switchover window.
Short term opinion
The last thing to do then after the move and all that was to update my nameservers. My domains are registered with PairDomains, and that’s not going to change for now, though it might make sense in the future to move those domains over the Kualo’s registration system. I’ll check the pricing on that too. Updating nameservers there was simple enough, and as DNS does, things moved over fairly quickly - in about a day or so.
That’s it really - all over and functional. Kualo seems perfectly fine, everything has continued to work, and indeed there are a few more perks which Pair didn’t have. That full cPanel is a nice front end albeit it with an insane number of possibilities which I’m trying to avoid in case I break something, but all in all, control and checking status is very easy.
Is it better than Pair? Hmmm… I’m going to say it’s a more transparent system that Pair’s, but I value uptime and stability above most else, so we’ll have to wait and see.