Solving Bluehost Hosting Problems

July 6, 2009 — Mrs. Mecomber

I had Bluehost as my web hosting company for a year. I am a professional blogger (that is, I am paid to blog for various articles), and I run a dozen blogs. I need a reliable web host.

I DID NOT find Bluehost reliable.

I was paying over $100 a year for unending frustrations. Bluehost came to me highly recommended, but I had SO MANY problems. I hated seeing those constant ‘CPU Quota Exceeded’ errors pages, and ‘This Account Has Been Suspended’ pages, and had constant problems. And when ONE of my websites was down, they ALL went down. What crap! I tried a few other budget hosts, none that brought me any satisfaction. I finally went with Hostgator, after hearing some friends give it high reviews.

HOLY COW, what had I been waiting for?!?!

I have NEVER received a “CPU Quota Exceeded” error page, EVER on any of my blogs, with Hostgator. I have NEVER had my account “suspended” (more like ripped out from under me), ever. I have been incredibly impressed with Hostgator. Wow. I cannot recommend them highly enough. You can read my more detailed review here.

I was dropping Entrecards recently and saw another poor blogger who had several blogs with the “Account Suspended” message. This particular blogger is a GOOD blogger, too, not a spam blogger. :( I was aggravated to see it.

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I just wanted to remind any of my blogging readers that I highly, highly recommend Hostgator. I’ve had my share of web hosts out there, and I’ve had my share of LOTS of problems. I am a Hostgator affiliate, so know that anyone who signs up with Hostgator through my affiliate link helps me to earn $50. But also know that those folks who have bought Hostgator through my affilate link have gotten free tech help from me, and have gotten A+ service from Hostgator. If you go through my affiliate link for Hostgator, I will do what I can to help you through the initial process of transferring/setting up a website through them. I’m no tech expert, but I have done a lot of my own blogs, and I’ve helped several folks get started with Hostgator.

They are great! I say: DUMP BLUEHOST and spend your money with a reliable host. Feel free to leave a comment or use the Contact Form if you have any questions. I totally love Hostgator!!

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Posted in Blogger, blogs, websites, Wordpress. Tags: , , , . 1 Comment »

Going With Hostgator

January 30, 2009 — Mrs. Mecomber

It’s hard to fathom that only a year and a half ago, I was completely baffled by the concept of blog hosting, ftp, and cPanel. Now, I am more comfortable. And I haven’t destroyed any of my websites in the process! Amazing!

I’ve had my share of webhosts: Whip An Orbit, WizzerdWerks, Dreamhost, Bluehost, and my new account, Hostgator. I have to say, I’m really enjoying Hostgator. Plus, they have the cutest little alligator. This was my first time transferring ALL my blogs onto a new webhost, with one swift stroke. I signed up for Hostgator’s free service to do it for me, and less than 24 hours later, all my sites are on Hostgator’s servers, the nameservers have been switched over, and my cPanel is chugging along quite smoothly.

WOW it is so good to have this all settled! I highly recommend Hostgator. I checked out their background considerably before signing up with them. They have a good history of uptime, with a 99.9% guarantee. And, unlike Bluehost, when one website has problems, all your websites do not crash. This was the main reason why I left Bluehost. The constant CPU Quota Exceeded errors were driving me nuts. I was paying through the nose for them and they couldn’t seem to handle my website traffic. And when one website went down, ALL went down, all seven blogs. GR! This does not happen with Hostgator. And Hostgator’s pricing is OK. I thought it was a tad pricey ($112 per year), but I used a coupon code for 20% off, which brought the cost down a little. The nice thing is that Hostgator allows you unlimited domain accounts, server space, and bandwidth. So you could host 100 or more websites with them, and it wouldn’t cost a penny more. This is nice. I had a blog with WizzerdWerks, and I while I absolutely loved the uptime (their servers were NEVER down), it was costing me $50 PER WEBSITE. Ouch.

Other nice things about Hostgator:

  • They are competitively priced.
  • They have terrific uptime.
  • They will transfer your websites over to them for free.
  • They have a TON of help pages, video tutorials, and a great forum if you need help or tips.
  • The cPanel is excellent, easy to work with, and looks very pleasant, too.
  • They don’t give you those stupid CPU Quota Exceeded errors and lock you out of your websites, like Bluehost does.
  • They can handle higher-traffic websites.

So anyway, if you decide to move your blogs to a new, reliable host, or are looking for some good solid web hosting to start up some sites, I think you may want to give Hostgator a look. If you would like, maybe you’d think about using my Hostgator affiliate link to place your order. Clicking on the Hostgator badge in this post or on the one in my sidebar will take you to the Hostgator home page. If you place an order using my affiliate badge, I get credit– $125 for every person who signs up through me! That’s a big chunk of change. And you can become a Hostgator affilate, too. See the site for more details.

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Posted in blogs, web hosting, websites, Wordpress. Tags: , , . 3 Comments »

A Dreamy Deal From Dreamhost

January 7, 2009 — Mrs. Mecomber

I was blog hopping the other day and came across a post about a spectacular promotion for Dreamhost, one of the bigger web hosting companies. Using the promo code 220, I saved $193 off a $216 two-year web hosting package! So I got two years of web hosting for $21 or so! It was a “rush rush” kind of deal (the promo expired January 5th and I found out about it halfway through the day). But it was just too sweet a deal to pass up. I know a few people who have Dreamhost, and while it’s not the primo hosting site, it’s up there with the big dogs of shared hosting.

For me, it is wise to spread several of my sites on various web hosts. Right now I have a lot of sites on Bluehost and one on WizzerdWerks (a tiny web host in Florida). I have my qualms with Bluehost: when one site goes down (which seemed to happen a lot when I first signed up with them, but it is much better now), they ALL go down. I hate that. But Bluehost has excellent customer service and a very good cPanel.

WizzerdWerks is much more reliable than Bluehost, but there is virtually NO support. They say they are available 24/7 and have Live Chat, but I never get a tech support rep when I call– I wait about 10 minutes on hold and then have to leave a message on their answering machine, and so far no one has ever called me back. It’s deplorable, and makes me very nervous. And their Live Chat has never been live yet. If only their support was… well, ALIVE, I’d shout their good service to everyone, because the server has been very reliable. But as it is, I cannot recommend them because no one is ever there. ??

Dreamhost, so far, looks good. There have been past complaints about their CPU limits (if you get too many visitors, they take your site down– which is what Bluehost does but WizzerdWerks does not). That REALLY stinks if someone Stumbles your posts with StumbleUpon. But Dreamhost says they don’t rip people’s sites out anymore, they will contact the client and work with them. I really don’t expect a whole lot out of Dreamhost– probably about the same that I get with Bluehost. But WOW, $21 for two years was too good to pass up. Bluehost costs me about $100 a year. If Dreamhost and Bluehost have comparable hosting service, which I believe they do, then I did phenomenally well.

So always look around for promo codes before you buy anything, even a web host account. I did a quick web search and found pages of promo codes. You can save a bundle!

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Posted in blogs, web hosting, websites. Tags: , , . Comments Off »

A Lesson to Be Learned

October 20, 2008 — Mrs. Mecomber

Over the weekend, I had some technical problems with my other blog, New York Traveler.net. The comments features on the blog were totally unoperational. A day previously, I had updated the Akismet plugin (Akismet is a software plugin that traps spam comments on blogs). I couldn’t be sure that the Akismet plugin was related to my problems, because I had updated it on my other blog and the comments were working fine. It was totally baffling.

After going through the usual recourse (disabling plugins one at a time, changing the blog theme, searching forums), I finally called my web host, Bluehost. The first call was a disaster: the technician said he couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so goodbye. :-p If you’re wondering why so many bloggers are leaving Bluehost, that’s probably a good reason right there.

But I called again, because I had discovered some odd language in my error logs, at my cPanel for Bluehost. You’d think the technician would have checked the logs?! Is he too busy watching his HDTV show or something?! Well, I read over the error logs and saw that for some reason, comments were being regarded as “duplicate content.” I couldn’t decode the language, so I called and talked with a gentleman named John. Wow, was he courteous and helpful! John looked at the error log and said that perhaps my blog needed a little housecleaning. He said blog databases sometimes get full of various extra stuff (blogs are extremely flexible, because so much happens with them- posting, drafting, commenting, moderating comments, etc). John said that sometimes all you have to do is a little database repair– and this is as easy as clicking a button for the process to go automatically.

Every cPanel is a little different for every host, so I can’t begin to address all the variables here. But know that if something has just suddenly gone awry, consider repairing and/or optimizing your database. A call to your host’s tech support can help you find out how to do this. For me, I just had to go to my cPanel’s database wizard, and click “repair database.” It took less than 10 seconds. And guess what? PROBLEM SOLVED!!! Thanks, John!

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Posted in blogs, help, websites, Wordpress. Tags: , , , , . Comments Off »

Blogger New Feature

May 2, 2008 — Mrs. Mecomber

I’ve pulled away from Blogger for the most part (at least for the blogs I monetize), but I do still have a few blogs with them, and I do still pay attention to what they are doing. The latest feature just released is the ability to pre-schedule posts. WordPress has had this feature for a long time, and I’m glad to see Blogger take it on. It’s a wonderful feature, and I use it a lot with WordPress. This is from their news release post:

Scheduled post publishing, which we talked about testing on Blogger in draft last month, is now live for everyone. If you set a post’s date into the future, Blogger will wait to publish until that time comes.

Have you ever wanted to announce something on a certain date but knew you wouldn’t be at a computer to make a post? Or you wanted to keep posting regularly but knew you’d be on vacation for a few weeks? Scheduled post publishing is here to help you out.

There are a few extra steps to take for “bumping” posts, but anything is an improvement here.

I kind of lost repect for Blogger after hearing that Google was arbitrarily deleting or suspending accounts they didn’t feel were “worthy.” Sure, some sites were probably spam– I’ve come across a lot of them– but not all of them were! If you had a harmless blog about the wonders of wood shutters and dared to monetize your blog without Google’s AdSense, you risked deletion. With a week after I heard about Google’s actions, I hopped on over to Bluehost web hosting and WordPress. The transfer from Blogger to WordPress was agonizing, but the risk of losing a year’s worth of posts just because I monetize my blogs was too great.

Anyway, Blogger is introducing new features every few months, it seems. They are doing a good job of keeping up with the big dogs. And Blogger is a terrific place for a beginner blogger. Plus, it’s still FREE!

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Posted in Blogger, blogs, free stuff, Google. Tags: , , . Comments Off »

Bluehost CEO’s Blog

April 18, 2008 — Mrs. Mecomber

I have discovered that the President and CEO of Bluehost, my new and favorite web hosting company, has a blog! It’s Matt Heaton.com. I love it when CEOs have blogs. Blogs are extremely personal and allow you to interact with the higher folks up the food chain. He has some great insights to offer about his business. This recent post about identity theft is very good.

There is no incentive to fix security problems. In fact, there is TONS of money being made by these companies on all that fraud that is happening out there. Chargeback fees to companies doing the billing are getting higher and higher. As the fraud increases Visa and others simply increase the discount rate that merchants like us pay to interchange for processing to compensate. No problem right? Wrong, guess who pays? The consumer always pays in the higher prices that merchants are forced to pass on in ever increasing credit card fees.

I’m no high-falutin’ businesswoman, but I do have some interest in how businesses run. And some of his posts are extremely enlightening to consumers like me. Give it a read, you’ll find it very interesting and readable.

Plus, it’s very interesting to know that he was a missionary in Taiwan and now has five children! Cool!

:)

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Posted in blog reviews, blogs, security news. Tags: , . 1 Comment »
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