Wow, web hosting is something else! I’ve been going around in circles this week.
Because I’m creating a lot of niche affiliate sites, I have hosting with a number of different companies. I prefer to spread the sites around a little bit for the sake of inter-linking and in the event a server goes down for awhile. That way, just some of my sites will be offline but not all of them.
Just after the winter holidays, Dreamhost came out with a great promotion, 2 years of hosting for around $20. I jumped on it. Later I realized that Dreamhost does not provide cPanel access. They have their own system that is absolutely nothing like cPanel, including displaying traffic stats.
I figured it would be no big deal and I created a number of sites on Dreamhost, learning their system along the way. But as I have gone along, I’ve come across more and more programs that will only work with cPanel. Like WPManagerDX which mass installs wordpress in a flash. I use wordpress for all my sites now and this saves a ton of time. I’ve become aware of other programs that only work with cPanel as well. So I decided to move all those sites and to get another hosting account with unlimited domains allowed.
In the mean time, I have an account with another company that provides 5 unique IPs with your account to use for link building. I have little good to say about this group so I’ll just refer to them as “NS”. My experience has been that with 4 of the IPs the sites are either down or I can’t log into cPanel or I can’t connect via ftp. If it isn’t one problem it’s another and it’s constant. They’ll fix it and something else quits working. I sort of feel sorry for them!
The person who created the hosting packages appears to be a really good guy and to have good integrity. So, I hold out some hope that they’ll get past this phase, and turn into a valuable, reliable asset. I had a total of 3 money sites on those servers and I moved them today, to avoid any further rollercoaster rides with them.
I did get some new hosting today, too. I did lots of research and decided on FatCow.com. Good price and good reviews. I logged in and found they did not offer cPanel. They advertised having a cpanel, and I clearly assumed they meant the same cPanel most other hosting companies have. But, no. Good thing they have a 30 day money back guarantee.
I ended up getting another Hostgator account. I have had great service and uptime with them over many years and just decided to go with what I know, instead of being surprised by what some other company offers. I can recommend Hostgator without reservation. Boy do they have a lot of servers!
These are my current criteria for shared hosting:
When I could finally get onto the NS servers last night, I notice huge files labeled “CORE” in all of my blogs. After panicking about being hacked, I did some digging and learned the core files are created when an unstable plugin is being used on a blog and the junk it creates is being “dumped”, or the servers are unstable. I’ve never seen that kind of file before and I have a ton of wordpress blogs, all using very similar plugins. So plugins are not the problem here, unstable servers are. I was very glad to learn I could just delete these files but was not surprised at the cause.
I apologize that this has gotten kind of long and probably boring. I learned of another method for selecting niches and domains recently and I’ll talk more about that soon.
Until then, have a good one!
P.S. One last point! I have gotten VERY good at moving wordpress blogs from one server to another, so if anyone needs any help with this, contact me and we’ll see how I can help. I can also set up and customize blogs very well too. The first 5 people to contact me looking for help with a blog will be totally free.
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