I have recently changed my web hosting company and also my email. I have to report that it was a month of hassles, which I expected. I had had the same email since we opened our B&B in Staunton, Virginia since 2000. This has resulted over time in receiving over 350 emails per day of which about 90% or more was spam. This was in spite of the fact that I had many filters on my server and Norton on my home computer.

In order to cancel my old emails I had to find all the B&B sites on which I was listed so that I could ask them to update my email address. This was a good exercise as I discovered that I was listed on 20 B&B directories and I only pay for 7 of them. Some of these produce no business that I can tell of, but a free listing offers an off chance of getting 1 or 2 bookings a year so is still worth it. The reason some are free is that I got onto them when they started out as a B&B directory and so offered to list a B&B for free. Since then, nearly all of them now charge a fee.

Another reason I wanted to change my server was that my original server had sold out to another server who had just sold to yet another server. So I was checking my email on one server address but calling another for technical support. This is not good. I also found out that they had sold my domain registration to another company so tracking where my domain was held was another issue. This seems to be rampant in the business. If you want to know where you domain is held you can check at http://www.internic.net/.

What surprises me about the B&B sites that offer hosting is that they often charge $18 per month or more. When there are many plans out there below $10 this does not seem at all competitive.

So if you are fairly computer-savvy, I suggest you shop around and make sure you are getting the best deal when it comes to servers and web hosting.