Who’s your host?

  • Posted On: April 16th, 2007
  • Filed Under: WordPress
  • Tagged As:

Up until last night I was very happy with my hosting provider. Last month I even signed up for a two year package because the everything was going so smoothly.

Last night everything went south. Pages were loading slowly and ultimately not at all. Then, out of the blue, I started getting error messages telling me that the MySQL server was basically going AWOL. For whatever reason the MySQL server decided that it couldn't handle the load that this site was putting on it.

I contacted my host and discovered that according to them "WordPress is not an ideal solution for most users." They went on to tell me that I needed to find better blogging software.

Obviously I expressed my dissatisfaction with this and explained to them it was time for me to find a new hosting provider.  For two years WordPress has run fine on their servers.  They even recommend using WordPress!

Suddenly Sunday night, though, their server just quit.  So here I am, searching for a new host.  Anyone have any suggestions?



9 Responses to “Who’s your host?”

  1. April 17th, 2007 at 12:19 am

    I am fairly happy with http://www.psihost.com/ found them through http://www.hostingspeeds.com/, so far so good…

    - Jonathan
  2. April 17th, 2007 at 8:57 am

    “Obviously I expressed my dissatisfaction with this and explained to them it was time for me to find a new hosting provider.”

    Instead of the above, I really hope you used the phrase, “time for me to find a ‘better’ hosting provider”.

    - Zath
  3. April 17th, 2007 at 9:31 am

    I was so angry at the time I don’t quite remember what I said. Rest assured that my point was made.

    The customer service rep was repeating what the “hosting tech” had told him to tell me. He was apologizing like crazy and said it sounded like I was perfectly justified in my complaint.

    What’s amazing is that suddenly everything is … better not finish that sentence, eh?

    Right now I’m reading up on hosting providers and trying to figure out who is best for handling WordPress. We’ll see how it turns out.

    - WildBil
  4. April 17th, 2007 at 9:31 am

    I can tell you right now that I am dissatisfied with my host as well (ChiHost) and I’m just riding out my time with them. DreamHost has had a lot of problems and it’s really popular among bloggers so their problems have been well known and well documented.

    I would look on the Wordpress site. I believe they have a list of Wordpress friendly hosts. I would also tell the Wordpress folk about how your current host is treating you and I’m sure they would be happy to contact your host on your behalf as well if there is any question about the underpinnings of the application.

    I know that Bluehost, Lunarpages, and MidPhase/AN Hosting are quite popular. I don’t know what your budget is and I don’t know how you prefer to pay for services, but the one lesson that I have learned is that if you can afford to pay a monthly fee as opposed to pre-paying, you will be better off. Webhosts aren’t regulated and reserve the right to change their services at any given time (screw you) which could inconvenience you in the middle of a subscription period as you have experienced. Avoid pre-paying for any web hosting solutions if possible.

    Smaller webhosts will give you better customer service but you might pay more for less space and bandwidth while sacrificing uptime. The bigger hosts, in my experience, provide sloppier technical support and will nickel and dime you to death for things like addon domains, SSH access, or a static IP. They usually have excellent uptime though, so it’s a crap shoot.

    I wish you the best of luck in finding a new host.

    - Elise
  5. April 17th, 2007 at 12:40 pm

    I’ve used site5.com and so far they’ve been fast and they’ve got a great shared hosting plan for just $5/month if you sign up for the long-haul.

    I’ve also used ipowerweb.com which, if I’m not mistaken, bluehost.com is a reseller of. iPowerWeb is a little bit slower than site5 so far, but certainly, it has an impressive package with a nice feature list.

    In my opinion site5 has been the best as far as uptime and speed, but I’ve only been with them for a month and the site I have hosted with them doesn’t get any traffic yet, so I could be wrong.

    - Steve
  6. April 17th, 2007 at 9:12 pm

    Thanks for the excellent tips everyone. I’ll be reading up on these a lot over the next few days. I’m also testing out restoring a WordPress backup to figure out how well the transfer will go.

    As things develop I’ll be sure to update everyone.

    - WildBil
  7. April 19th, 2007 at 5:09 am

    i had the same kinda problems …
    my host moved my site somewhere … and i dunno where …
    but it works just fine now …

    - subcorpus
  8. April 21st, 2007 at 7:24 am

    I’ve been having similar problems with mediatemple, and may migrate away from them eventually. I have a server at Rackspace that I use for work stuff which is as solid as a rock - but costs about 50 times more than my mediatemple account that wpg runs on.
    One WP tip - make sure you run a cache plugin - can have a huge impact on your db calls.

    - Steve Wordpressguy
  9. April 21st, 2007 at 12:59 pm

    Coincidentally, after I made my earlier comment here my host decided to screw me over. Two nights ago they disabled my entire site because supposedly my site had a server load of 82 which is unacceptable and was causing their server to crash. I let the server admins have it via some nasty email to technical support and told them to put my site back up because they can’t suspend a site without giving the user the ability to try to correct the problem. They claimed I was having problems with my index files and with cron jobs. Ironically I have never run a cron job on their servers, but I did remove the WP Cron plugin from my Wordpress installation (which was not running) once they gave me access to the site and restored it online. Supposedly there have been no problems with it since then and I was warned by the admins that I should install all of the updates to the scripts I was running. They shot themselves in the foot when they said that because I reminded him that I was running whatever was most current in their implementation of Fantastico, and if there are problems with it that’s something that needs to be addressed by the web host, not by the individual users (which I learned when I tried to do manual updates to Wordpress without using Fantastico which caused enormous problems and resulted in me re-installing Wordpress from scratch with Fantastico anyway). When I said that I was dissatisfied with my current host (ChiHost) it was an understatement. Avoid them at all cost.

    I used to use a host by the name of Personalsites.org and they always treated me really well. I am considering going back to them for several reasons. First of all, they still offer monthly payments that are reasonable (under 10 dollars for a decent amount of storage and bandwidth). They don’t charge setup fees and they actually give refunds for down time which most hosts don’t bother with anymore simply because they’ve already collected your payment for an entire year and they have stopped caring about you. They also give support via IM and with a web based chat client and the people who work there are nice. They have also upgraded their equipment and bandwidth since I was with them last which I’m sure will result in a better experience for me. Ultimately the big thing for me is paying for the services monthly. If it turns out to be a bad situation I’m not locked in for a year.

    - justelise
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