You Get What You Pay For
If you have noticed that this blog has been going through some technical difficulties lately, I’m very sorry. I just switched from my old host, which was just $10 a year to HostGator which starts as low as $6.95 a month. It is a big jump up in price, but I think it is worth it. It’s actually quite the jump because I decided to go with the Swamp package which is considerably more, just shy of $15 a month.
On my old host, I could host one domain name and 6 subdomains only. They took 48 hours to manually approve my blog. When I decided to try hosting a second blog there, they accepted the payment but never approved my account! Repeated emails got no response and when I tried to go to their Customer Support, the page had vanished. Since I was having some technical problems with my blog (which I thought were caused by the server, but were really just my own stupidity!), I began to look for alternatives.
The Swamp Package here on HostGator allows me to have unlimited domains, far more bandwidth and space, unlimited subdomains, plus a zillion features that weren’t available on my old host. Plus they have live help, which I haven’t tried yet, but looks promising. Oh, and they have Fantastico which I needed because I’m so technically illiterate that I couldn’t figure out how to upload Wordpress! I decided to go with the Swamp package because I currently have two other (very neglected) blogs in the works and a website. All three are on free hosting, which is just a BAD idea! So this way, I can put them all onto the same account and not have to pay any extra.
Once I had signed up, I discovered that there are quite a few complaints about the service on their forums. But there is a lot more praise, so I guess time will tell. The nice thing is that I’m paying per month, so if I decide that this host isn’t the best, I can move on without losing my entire year as I did with the last host. HostGator also offers a money back guarantee for your first month, so it’s good for testing the place out. I’m personally quite tired of moving my blog all the time though, so hopefully I’ll stay right here.
As for the technical problems, I’m terribly embarrassed to admit this because it makes me look like SUCH a noob, but they were caused by copying and pasting from Word. Yes, I know. EVERYONE says not to do that and here I did it and it royally messed up my blog. The sidebar vanished and I couldn’t respond to comments, etc. It was quite the disaster, but a very nice person on the Wordpress Support Forum pointed out my mistake. Without ridiculing me too much. So from now on, my posts will be created in NotePad and should be all but error free. Thanks for your patience.
[...] more on Host Gator, check out my previous post on them. [...]
I learned this the hard way too. My first hosting package was very cheap compared to what I am using now, but when I forgot to renew my domain, they took my blog off!
I was at a conference when some of my blogger friends texted me and informed me that my blog was down. I tried calling my webhost but nobody answered my calls. I didn’t have internet access at the conference so I had to drive about an hour to the nearest cybercafe to send them my payment.
Nice post! GA is also my biggest earning. However, it?s not a much.