WordPress Made Easy » WordPress Hosting

Is Your Hosting Provider Lying to You?

ambie — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:29:02 +0000

Almost every hosting provider out there claims they have 99.9% uptime. That’s a huge promise to claim. There are only 525,600 minutes in a year. If your hosting provider is down for just 9 hours in the year, their 99.9% uptime goes down the drain. Has your provider been down for more than that this past year? I know mine has.

That may not sound like a long time, but if your site gets heavy traffic and those search engines are in the process of crawling your site, then 9 hours can be an eternity. Google may report broken links (not good), and your visitors may think you are not a serious site (not good).

I know we all spend a lot of time on our own sites, looking, checking and proofing the content. But are you on it 24 hours a day to verify that the site is up. What if it goes down without you knowing. You’ll probably never know!

Here’s a few tools to keep your hosting provider in check. They all automatically check your site to make sure it’s up and running, so you don’t have to worry about it.

Host-Tracker - The free version allows you to monitor up tp 2 URLs with 30 minute intervals.

Mon.itor.us - Free website monitoring with stats. For easy website checking, all you need to sign up for is the External Monitoring.

Montastic - A free and simple too to check your site. You really can get it all setup in less than a mintue. Allows for email alerts when your site is down.

Site Uptime - Offers free monitoring of 1 site, which will check your site every 30 minutes. $5 per month gets you up to 3 sites and checks them every 15 minutes.

Does Your WordPress Need a New Home?

ambie — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 23:34:15 +0000

WordPress is a breeze to install and use. But what if you your current hosting provider pissed you off, and now you have to move the installation to another hosting provider? There are many documents and way to do this. There are even a bunch WordPress tools to help with this. We tried a bunch of different ways and found that they get you 90% of the way there. Once your site has been moved, things still act funny, not all links work properly and even the dates of some posts get out of wack. We figured out and tested method of moving your WordPress install, seamlessly and quickly. Don’t spend weeks trying to fix your blog after you move it. Do it right the first time. This does require a little bit of technical knowledge, but we’re here to make it easy.

Use phpMyAdmin to backup your WordPress database.
- Log into phpMyAdmin
- In the Database drop down menu on the left, select your database.
- Click on ‘Export’
- In the EXPORT section on this page, make sure SQL is selected!
- In the SQL section, make sure the following is checked: STRUCTURE, ADD DROP TABLE, Add AUTO_INCREMENT & Enclose table and field names with backquote
- In the DATA section, make sure there is a check next to ‘DATA’ only. All the check boxes inside can be left blank.
- In the SAVE AS section, put a check next to ‘SAVE AS’, then click go.
- It will as you where on your computer to save the backup file. Make note of it, we’ll need this later!
  IMPORTANT: Make note of your database prefix. You’ll need this info later. The default prefix for WordPress is ‘wp_’.
Using an FTP client, connect to your OLD host, and make a copy of the entire WordPress folder. You actually only really need your themes and plugins folders, but it doesn’t hurt to get it all. This contains all the custom goodies to your site.
Install WordPress on your new server as if you were setting up a new site. IMPORTANT: Make sure to make your database prefix the same as your old install.
Go to your NEW host’s MySQL database (just created with the new WP install process), and delete the new tables from the database.
- Log into phpMyAdmin
- In the Database drop down menu on the left, select your database.
- This screen shows all the database tables. Click on the red ‘X’ under the ‘ACTION’ column. Do this for all the tables.
In the Database drop down menu on the left, select your database.
Use SQLyog or phpMyAdmin to import your backup database file into the new host’s MySQL database.
Simply FTP all your theme files and plug-ins to your new host’s folders. The locations are exactly the same as your previous host.

WordPress Hosting Recommendations

ambie — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:31:28 +0000

With all the choices for hosting your WordPress blog, how does one decide. We’ve tried a few, ranging from small to large companies. PressedbyAmbie.com is using GoDaddy’s hosting solution. They were next on our lists of companies to try. We’ll add them to our recommendations if their service is up to par.

Provider	Price	Domain Name	Disk Space	Bandwidth	Rating	WP Install	Review
HostMonster	$6.95	Free	1.5 TB	1.5 TB	*****	Yes	Super
DreamHost	$6.95	Free	1.5 TB	1.5 TB	*****	No	Super
HostGator	$7.95	Free	600 GB	6 TB	****	No	Good
Yahoo	$11.95	Free	Unlimited	Unlimited	**	Yes	BAD

HOSTMONSTER - SUPER

The good - Fast servers, lots of bandwidth, excellent 24hr customer service, cPanel admin page loaded with features. Easy WordPress install.

The bad - None yet!

DreamHost - SUPER

The good - Fast servers, lots of bandwidth

The bad - Customer service response time only OK. Admin panel a little confusing at first.

HostGator - GOOD

The good - Fast servers, lots of bandwidth, cPanel very feature rich, good customer service.

The bad - No WordPress auto install.

Yahoo Web Hosting - BAD

The good - Fast servers, lots of bandwidth, very easy to use admin page, easy WordPress install, good uptime.

The bad - Looooong wait for customer service (avg 250 min), price, some WordPress plugin compatibility issues. Transferring domain from Yahoo was a real nightmare.