I’m thinking about moving my gite website from Siteground who have got what I think is very expensive in recent years.
I have a .com domain in France. I’m paying 275.88€ for a year’s hosting to Growbig hosting and one year’s domain of 15.99€.
But I’m nervous about the implications of moving - I’m sure that’s what they rely on.
Does anyone have any thoughts / suggestions please? Thanks
@graham usually knows what’s what… 
Depends what infrastructure it needs.
I moved mine to Ionos when we were renting ours out from some other provider who kept increasing theor price. The files were stored on my PC so it was easy just uploaded to the new provider.
I know things like Wix keep your files and you often have to pay them to release them. Nasty lot.
I am sure Graham will have more information.
I have recently built a website and bought domains with www.NameCheap.com
Not expensive and seems fine
So did Siteground in the first year!
I think pretty simple, but not sure what that quite entails. I originally built it (using wordpress) several years back using the template and lessons given by a guy on Laymyhat (gite owners forum). Sadly he migrated everything onto Facebook and I was not prepared to follow, so now I cope as best I can with his template. I don’t have to do any HTML when I add text. If there is a limit on number of pages I’m nowhere near it. It includes a blog facility. I have an enquiry page but I don’t do any financial transactions on it. I obviously have lots of photos and a review page where people can add their own comments about their holiday, after I’ve reviewed them. And that’s pretty much it.
This is my site: http://larrival.com/our-cottage/
Your gîte is amazing… we’re getting our cases down from the attics…
So you probably just need someone who offers Wordpress hosting.
If you know anyone who can manage to configure a “bare” machine then Kimsufi do dedicated servers starting from €3.99 (ex VAT) a month (so €57.60 a year) and their lowest tier server would be fine for you I suspect. The catch is that the cheap ones are difficult to get and the cheapest currently on offer is a higher spec at €7.99/mo.
Their virtual servers are cheaper at £3 (ex VAT) per month.
Even cheaper Wordpress hosting here (no affiliation, just the first hit from Google)
We use fasthosts for domain .com name and hosting, and built our website using their website builder which was straightforward. Actually do need ro redo it all as a bit dated now!
But costs us around £90/year. And suits us it being in English (as I am a numpty) and paying in ££s as saves us loosing on exchange rate. We found all the french sites more expensive.
WordPress Hosting | Reliable UK WordPress Hosting | Fasthosts
I was going to suggest the arrangement @Mat_Davies put in place for his Gite which he seems quite pleased with.
Mine aren’t John. They are only on Siteground. So that’s an issue for me - is it possible to transfer a site? Who “owns” my site?
Agreed Jane, I understand so little about all this that any hosting would have to be in English.
I have no experience of Siteground but the hosting environments I have used allow you to copy files or backup your site to somewhere else (e.g. a PC) from where you can upload your files onto another provider’s hosting environment but it’s usually not intuitive, sadly. 
EDit: In my view you are paying over the odds for that hosting arrangement at the moment!
Thank you to everyone for your input. At the moment I am panicking because I understand so little about what I am doing. So, what I have done is downgraded to a simpler plan on Siteground that only allows one website and gone over to a monthly payment. That gives me a month in which to sort out a new option.
I looked at my payment history. I started with them in September 2016 and paid 56.88 (inc VAT) for my first year!!! I’m not good at keeping an eye on these things and have just let them rip me off.
Anyway, your comments have helped me take action. Thanks
I also use Fasthosts for hosting and email.
They may not be the cheapest, but their support is superb
The one thing it’s worth remembering is that namecheap, because, well, it’s cheap (for the first year at least), does tend to be the fraudster’s choice. While this has no direct consequence to most users you can find that it’s difficult if not nigh on impossible to get things like emails you send out to people to go into their inbox rather than spam, or being blocked altogether by providers filters, as a significant proportion of spam/ phishing/ general dodgyness comes from namecheap registered domains so some servers treat it with suspicion by default. This is not to say they’re not a perfectly good provider and I have no idea of what percentage of users this actually affects, but my friends who do IT support for businesses tell me it is definitely an issue to some degree.
But you can set up correct SPF records etc to address this.
Hi Sue
There are any number of webhosts that will host a wordpress website. Just google them.
It is important thet you find a host in the country where most of your bookings come from? If it’s UK then pick hosting that is physically in the UK. If you have statistics with Siteground then look to see how much “bandwidth” you use, this could keep the costs down. Look for a host that offers “free migration” they can then move the entire site for you.
It’s also your choice what you do with the domain name, either move it with your hosting or move it to another domain name provider.
Wherever you choose to go check out their customer service first and what reviews they have.
Good luck, it’s not as difficult as it seems.
Hi Sue,
I use Planethoster (Canadian) for domain names and some hosting, cost respectively 12,99€ and 96€ annually. Their interface is in EN and FR. You can choose hosting in France. Their support is good.
Hi Sue,
Some hosts will carry out the site migration for you for free.
I left Siteground some years ago for the same reason you are now looking elsewhere.
I currently use Ethernet Servers hosting - https://www.ethernetservers.com/
They offer free site migration and are also relatively cheap.
You can also choose to host your website on a server in the UK or France depending on where most of your traffic comes from.
It might also be a good idea to consider moving your domain name to somewhere like Namecheap. That way your domain name and hosting are separate and you can easily swap and change services in the future.
I have been using Namecheap for years because they have consistently good pricing for domains and renewals usually around £8 or £9 per year depending on what you choose.
You can also get some money off when you buy or renew a domain if you have the Honey app installed in your web browser, it will automatically search for and apply any available discount codes.