Moving from CIHOST - any advice?

[Ciaran]

We are currently hosted on CIHOST, and are thinking of changing due to recent downtime over the last few weeks.

What we are looking for is a similar package for a similar price (about $70 a quarter). Account must have PHP/MySQL, imagemagic, cron, SSL, control panel with file maint, sendmail, gzip compression etc. Currently we have 1gig, which I feel is enough for our needs.

Some host providers that appear to offer similar packages are http://www.imhosted.com and http://www.valuehost.com.

Can anyone rate either of these host providers, or even recommend another one?

Also, any advice on how to reduce downtime due to swapping over?

MTIA.

[dandanfireman]

During some recent server moves I did the following to reduce downtime.

1. Setup new account on new server
2. Shutdown forum
3. Move site and database to new host
4. grant access to new database from old host's IP address
5. change /admin/config.php on old host to reflect new IP (instead of localhost), dbuser, dbpassword and dbname
6. change /admin/config.php on new host to reflect localhost, dbuser, dbpassword and dbname
7. open forum again
8. change dns

This should allow users to get to your forums from the old host as well as the new host...but on the same database so you don't lose any posts.