May 19, 2010, at 4:09 pm
If you’re a regular visitor to the site or even if this is your first visit you probably noticed that there hasn’t been anything written for the last three weeks and if there was, it’s all gone now. Well here is the story. Up until yesterday, I was under the strict regime of GoDaddy.com. About a year and a half ago, Mr. Smith and I purchased the domain name That’s-All-Folks.com as well as a three year hosting plan. Needless to say, our experience has been less than pleasant.
Besides the fact that any updates to your account may take hours to go into effect, there was also the recent slew of malware attacks that prevented you from doing anything within your wordpress account and placed a little virus on your homepage giving it to every passer by. In the past month or so I spent over twenty hours backing up, deleting, reinstalling and fixing all the files in my database. The straw that broke the camels back however is probably the most important thing to a website and that is load time. The slower the website loads, the less likely visitors will be coming back. I don’t believe I remember the site ever having decent load time but when it started taking over a minute to load, that was it for us. We contacted GoDaddy.com because we were concerned with the frequent occurrences and received the most generic answer we could think of – “It’s our server, we’re working on it but we don’t have a schedule so there’s no knowing when anything will be fixed” – and suggested that we pay about $30 a month for a dedicated server (we were currently on a shared server with God knows how many other people and a dedicated server will be just ours – ergo faster load time).
We still had over a year left on our account so we decided to get a refund for what was left over and try out the dedicated server for a month. I called Go Daddy back and was bombarded with question about my technical knowledge because apparently when I get a dedicated (or virtual) server I have to manage it completely, a little piece of information that we would have appreciated from the get go. So turns out that unless you are a technical whiz, you have to deal with very lengthy load times and no help. We immediately decided to make the hard decision of changing hosts. We turned to BlueHost.com as we’ve heard many good things about them from fellow website owners.
Since it’s been over a year since I set up the original site, I was a little rusty and not entirely comfortable switching everything that needed to be switched and how. A few hours later and a few phone calls to their helpful customer service reps, everything was done. I had to change the info in my Filezilla to connect to the ftp and move all the files I backed up earlier, mind you, your ftp files don’t actually contain your database and you have to upload it separately into your wordpress / Blue Host account (Don’t ask). The problem was that since I already canceled my Go Daddy account (At which point they immediately delete all your information and database) I couldn’t go back and get some of the info I needed like my wordpress database. All I had was a database back up I made three weeks ago and so any posts or changes to the posts I have made since then have been permanently deleted, never to be seen again.
So a piece of advice to anyone attempting to go through this dangerous procedure, make sure your new hosting plan is set up before canceling your old one, you never know what you might need to go back for. I am very sad about the few articles that are now gone but I guess that is life right? In case your wondering, the site now loads in about 1-2 seconds which is absolutely fantastic and so far BlueHost.com has been great. Unlike Go Daddy, Blue Host offers unlimited space, unlimited email usage and unlimited domains to be used on one account as well as a great selection of freebies and advertising credits.
