I currently use two web hosting companies to host the several domains that I own. I’m still with my old web hosting provider in spite of my recent downtime predicament with them, because I’m just waiting on my hosting account to expire so that I can get my domains the hell away from there. I chose another web hosting company that claims that they specialize in WordPress-based hosting. So far I’m OK with them, but I’m not 100% totally happy with its uptime; I’ve got a nagging suspicion that accessing my site is slower compared to before. Could it be because of the increased traffic I’m getting into my site? I can’t really say, because my traffic hasn’t increased that much, to only another 1,000 or so increase from my normal 3,000+ page views.

I am highly considering the following web hosting providers, which are BlueHost, 1&1 , 1Power, and Doteasy - web hosting. BlueHost has such a great reputation among WordPress-based blog owners, and even WordPress.org itself endorses it. 1&1 and Doteasy have fantastic packages, and whilst 1&1 have very attractive domain prices, the clients I had before who used my web design services said they have a good experience with Doteasy support. I’m putting 1Power in my list because of its affordable options for both domains and hosting packages.

I’ll be making my final decision by the end of May just to be sure that these providers continue to stick as my choice web hosting provider.

It has been a nerve-wrecking week for WebGrrrl.net, as the site keeps getting suspended time and again due to CPU overload.

It started when the idiot owner of mp3central.blogspot started hotlinking an Estranged image in one of my posts, and even with MySQL optimization, hotlinking protection, WP Super Cache and IP/domain deny on, I was getting bombarded with access errors and traffic increase of more than 600%. My hosting provider hasn’t got a clue, and asked me to create a robots.txt to avoid web crawler traffic (my stats showed nothing peculiar about them crawlers even after I compared them with my older logs), and switch off all the “modules” that I was currently using — clearly they don’t know anything about WordPress. Needless to say, I wasn’t very happy with their suggestions, but did it anyway. The problem didn’t go away, as I predicted.

What frustrates me the most about this whole mess is that I had to waste my time waiting for support to get back to me with the CPU load stats only after every 24 hours, because that’s how often they update their stats. Imagine having to wait like that for four straight days? That’s ridiculous. They should have had direct access to the hardware for them to monitor and give me a report every couple of hours.

Out of desperation, I set up a temporary hosting in WordPress.com and forwarded my domain there for about two days, as my search for a dedicated WordPress hosting provider continued. I would have stuck with WordPress.com if not for the fact that I cannot change my WP theme and add my choice of plugins. As of today, this domain is hosted by WPWebHost and I plan on staying with them for a whole year. My other domains are currently hosted in my old hosting provider and I plan to let it stay until my hosting expires this July. By that time, I’d be making enough extra online income to buy myself a VPS or dedicated server.