Posts Tagged "WordPress"

What is Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting means that the same server (computer) hosts more than a single website. With the powerful processors of today, it’s not at all unusual to find hundreds of websites hosted on a single server.

This means, however, that there may be dozens, even hundreds of sites running on the same CPU, RAM, and hard drive configuration – all in battle with for the very same, limited resources.

Here are some of the problems inherent with hosting on shared hosting plans:

How Low Can You Go? Or Overhyped-Benefits

Often the price for a shared hosting account however, is very low. You’ll find quickly that you “get what you pay for” when you see:

  • Pricing that seems too good to be true (sometimes too low is too low)
  • Offering hundreds of dollars worth of free add-ons (maybe you don’t need Ruby on Rails or 1000 email boxes)
  • Unlimited or an enormous amounts of disk space and bandwidth (but buried in the fine print is the resource limitation clause)
  • Not enough resources (the number of domains and databases can be important as you grow)
  • Guarantees of 100% uptime (Downtime will occur and it is a reality in the web hosting business. It’s the regular and/or extended outages to be concerned about)

Everybody’s in the Pool

What happens when a bunch of sites on the shared server starts to grow in traffic and complexity? All the other sites on the box may suffer slower response times because of it.

Who are your neighbors? They could be spammers (resource hogs) or hackers (malicious/bad coders) or snoopers (actually accessing your files!) that can easily take a site down (by mistake or on purpose).

Most of the time, one failure may bring down the entire server, causing your website to be unavailable unexpectedly. This means you would have to deal with downtime a number of times.

Bad Technical Support

  • Clueless and unable to assist with the most basic of issues
  • Unreliable and unavailable support
  • Response time is poor and many tickets are not replied to in an effective manner

Nightmare Scenarios

Some nightmare scenarios include:

  • Some hosts might cut off a blog without warning due to traffic spikes (you found limitations in their unlimited plans)
  • Some say generically “you’re taking up too many resources” (you can be if your blog is popular, but they should help you grow)
  • Email boxes full of spamming (which blacklists your site!)
  • Bad backups (you might find that the ones they have are really old, only go back for 3 days, not done at all, you are actually responsible for your own backups)
  • They are not blog-friendly (watch out for the ole “We do not provide support for third party scripts.”
  • They tell you that you are responsible for fixing most of your issues.

WordPress Bloggers Should Expect

  • A host that grows with them
  • A host that supports them
  • We want to be that host

Our Story

Posted In BlogOnCloud9

BlogOnCloud9 was born out of the desire for great WordPress hosting.

Our parent company, ContentRobot, has recommended a variety of hosts since we started our full-service blogging company four years ago. We would be happy to provide our clients with a name or two that we thought were solid services at decent prices.

Unfortunately, as we (and WordPress) evolved, we found that hosts seemed to become increasingly unable to successfully serve and support the platform. As time went on, we became reticent to suggest hosting companies that we had routinely liked in the past.

During the summer of 2009, however, we started to upgrade our clients to WordPress 2.8 and found that many sites were having trouble staying up or were now extremely sluggish. Despite fiddling with plugins like WP Super Cache and applying server tweaks, we seemed to be losing a battle with site performance. The common denominator was shared hosting plans, which were failing popular sites.

Why didn’t ContentRobot offer hosting?

Clients would often ask us if we would host their blogs and blog-powered websites, but we were unsure if we wanted to take on that responsibility. We are now ready to step up and offer a WordPress hosting environment that we had only dreamed about.

We had experience with a variety of hosts and their configurations and believe that Rackspace Cloud Sites will give our clients the best environment on which to blog and get down to business.

Going beyond the technology, we had also run into the barriers of not being able to get proper WordPress support. To most hosts, it was just a piece of software and they weren’t bothering to learn how to assist with optimal configurations or even research resolutions to any problems with the software.

How about WordPress support?

Along with hosting, we are offering our years of expertise that we have garnered at ContentRobot. Not only to help clients with installing, configuring and WordPress and its related software, but to help clients with any of their blog-related issues (support, migrations, upgrades, and more).

And finally, we love WordPress because of its generous community that provides so many solutions with plugins, widgets, and third-party add-ons. Sometimes, though, too many choices lead  to problems.

ContentRobot has taken the time to find and review the best-in-class solutions. We know what works and what doesn’t work. Also, who are the key developers are and who are actively involved in updates and enhancements.

Now, BlogOnCloud9 customers can take advantage of our custom WordPress installation which will give you blogging, security, spam, SEO, and metrics tools, designed to help you manage your blog from the get-go.

We are excited to offer cloud-based WordPress hosting. Welcome to BlogOnCloud9.