(Hopefully) My Best Move Ever

Hopefully you haven’t noticed much other than it loading several times more quickly, but The Literate Housewife Review has moved from one web host to another.  Back in February, my site was shut down without advance notice by my then host, LunarPages.  I was at work at the time and used my lunch break to call in to their customer support line after replying to their ticket.  This ticket notified me in extremely vague terms that my site had been shut down because it was consuming too many of their server resources.  The customer support team member I was eventually connected to (after about a 10 minute wait on hold), was supremely unhelpful.  The call left me scrambling and frustrated.  After several more hours and two more calls (too bad I didn’t write down how much time I spent on hold…) to LunarPages, they provided me with access to turn my site back on with very little guidance as to how I could resolve their issues with my blog.  Thankfully I received a lot of support from Twitter and advice that I received from Trish helped me identify a WordPress.org plug in that reduced my usage.  I then went in and deactivated all other unnecessary plug ins.  I was exhausted by the end of that day and none too happy with LunarPages.  Unfortunately, I had just renewed my contract for 12 months in January and had just missed the time frame within which I could get a refund.  Since those WordPress changes seemed to take care of the issue, I decided to leave well enough alone until the end of my contract.  I wasn’t up to making the change anyway.  I’ve heard it can be a huge nightmare.  I set aside the referrals I had received and tried to forget about the whole thing.

Last Thursday night, I was preparing my review of Legend of a Suicide for a TLC Book Tour date the next day.  At the beginning of the evening, I was able to search my site for things, but at a certain point I noticed that I was seeing my blog’s Index page instead of the site itself.  I immediately created a ticket because their basic customer service telephone support was closed for the evening.  After submitting my ticket, Danny and I noticed that my Index PHP file was appended with a “disabled” extension.  I went into LunarPages and removed that extension.  Tada!  My site was back and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me who might have done that.  I notified their tech support through my ticket and changed my password.  About an hour later, I received a notification that my site was once again eating up too much of their server resources.  Had I not been paying attention, my site would have been down a full two hours before I was notified.

This time I knew what to do.  First, I verified that I had the most up-to-date version of WordPress.org.  Check.  Then, I thought about what I had added to my site recently.  The only thing I added was a button for the Book Blogger Blues ning I’m working on with Marcia.  I removed that and responded to LunarPages ticket letting them know that I had previously un-disabled my Index file and the action I took on my site.  I asked that they keep my site up for 24 hours to see if that fixed their issue.  In LunarPages’ defense, they watched it closely but kept it up.  By Friday afternoon, my usage wasn’t down as much as they would have liked. The tech suggested that I start only displaying only a teaser on my blog by default (huh?).  Instead of doing something that would annoy the hell out of me, I removed all of my LibraryThing widgets with the exception of my Currently Reading widget.  That seemed to do the trick.

This all got me thinking.  I may have had four or five widgets that interfaced with other sites and took up extra resources, but my site is by no means overly busy or the complex blog out there.  Was this an issue of my blog or was it an issue with LunarPages’ servers?  Well, I decided that the best way to test this out was to take the plunge and move my blog elsewhere.  Here is the criteria I used:

1. 24/7 support for all plans, not just for those paying extra.
2. WordPress knowledge – because I’m just not that familiar with the guts of this life.
3. A ticket system that didn’t penalize you for replying (LunarPages puts your tickets to the bottom of the pile every time you respond – there are not words to describe how frustrating this was)
4. Another friend/blogger recommendation
5. A sense that I wasn’t trading the devil I knew for one I didn’t.

What I found was many web hosts that had these features and more for less cost than LunarPages.  Granted, criteria #5 remains to be seen, so I’m not going to publically mention the name of the host I selected until I’ve have more experience with them under my belt.  Here is what I do have to report to date:

• New Web Host (NWH) has 24/7 live support by phone and live chat.  I love that!  Live chat is, in my opinion, the best way to get help on-line.  If I wanted to talk to a person, I would have called the company instead of going to their website in the first place.
• The first person I chatted with at NWH took the time to understand me and my needs.  Catch this – he suggested that I use the same WordPress.org plug in that Trish told me about.  He then let me know without asking that their company was extremely familiar with WordPress both personally and professionally and sent me a link to suggested WordPress.org plug ins (What’s that? Encouraging the use of blog technologies? ). I felt like I’d just seen the best counselor or confessor of my life when the chat came to an end.  I was able to have the transcripts emailed to me as well.
• NWH offered to transfer my site from LunarPages for free.  SQUEEE!!!  That was terribly exciting for me.  All I had to do was provide information about my current setup.  I had questions about that and was able to complete this information in less than 5 minutes after another pleasant live chat experience.
• NWH’s control panel shows me the activity on my site, including it’s CPU usage, etc…  Now, I can add things to my blog and monitor the effects myself before critical mass is reached.  At this point, I haven’t added back the things I took off last week, but the way it is, my blog is taking up .1% of their CPU.  I was at 3.4% the last time LunarPages provided me that information.  This is for the same blog, all the same stuff.  To me, this is just that much more proof that I made the right decision.
• NWH created a ticket when they started porting my blog over.  There was no restriction on the number of times I could respond or any impact on getting my issues addressed.
• Two friends felt that NWH would be a good fit for me.
• Overall, I feel appreciated by NWH.  I feel like a customer, not someone who was reluctantly allowed some disc space for a fee.  Regardless of all the other things I’m loving about NWH, this fact alone goes a long, long way.

While all of this was going on last week, I created a new group on Book Blogging Blues for discussion of hosting and other technology issues that crop up for book bloggers.  Please feel free to join this group and discuss issues you might have.

I’m hoping that The Literate Housewife Review now has a permanent home where it can grow and be nurtured so long as I’m ready, willing, and able.  It certainly feels good now.