The first week of a new hosting company

Well, if you have read some of my other posts, you would know that I helped another wordpress site switch hosting companies last week.

Fortunately the switch was quite painless.  They have almost 100 contributors, and I have never set up or configured a WordPress install before, but Bluehost made it easy.  We choose Bluehost because they are on the top of the list recommended by WordPress, and they have a big system set up, their prices are reasonable, and their customer service is pretty good.  All of those things were considerations before we moved.  The hosting company we moved from is owned by a friend of mine and he has 2 servers, one of which can’t run the latest install of WordPress.  I still use his company for all of my sites, and some others, as he has a great price point and I can usually get ahold of him when I need something.

So why did we switch?  The site that switched www.SpeakWithoutInterruption.com was just getting so much traffic and has so much content and pictures and contributors logging in and making posts that it just drew too much attention for his single server to handle.  When you are a content rich site drawing hundreds of users a day, you also tend to attract botnets that try and get in and take your content.  My friend’s servers could not handle the attacks, nor did he have the time or the staff to sit there and plug all the ports.  Switching to Bluehost however gave us 24/7 support, a help desk, a easy WordPress install process, unlimited traffic, unlimited file transfer, etc.  The list goes on and on. Free Domain With $6.95 Hosting Package

I was able to configure the WordPress install very easily and only needed minimal support from my friend on how to export the files from his system.  I loaded the files into the Bluehost system very easily and they even had a video tutorial on how to do it.  The DNS server name change did take a couple ours from our domain registrar, but I started the process around 10 pm and by midnight we were already getting spam caught in the Askimet filter.  Most everything worked like a charm which was good because I wouldn’t know how to fix it if something did go wrong other than deleting everything and starting over.

A HUGE benefit was being able to use the phpMyAdmin process to export and import.  As I mentioned there is a ton of content at Speak Without Interruption and thus the export feature built into WordPress was a large file.  After a little research I estimated it to be about 4 or 5 times the size of what was considered the maximum that would work.  Which meant I would have had to export each user individually (100 users) which would have been very painful. 

Lastly, however, by Monday someone’s site on the server we were assigned to was getting a DOS attack.  This in turn slowed or shut down all the sites on that server for hours over the next couple days.  We called their tech support and they explained what was going on and that they had a team of 20 or 30 working on it to get it resolved.  If anyone has dealt with a DOS attack you know they are not pretty.  By Wednesday or Thursday, all seemed to be working fine again and everything seems to be up and running as normal today.  All in all, I am quite pleased with Bluehost, and they maintained their customer support even after we called them about 5 times on Tuesday asking various questions.

Have any of you dealt with Bluehost?  Leave your comments.

Johnny Optimist
The Other 1/2 is Full of Opportunity