Just what the hell was going on with my website for the past month?
Viewers of my website might have noticed a lot of downtime and errors lately. So what was that all about? Well, it’s a lengthy story that spanned the past month.
It all started with errors on the back end of my site with the web host Site5. They couldn’t seem to really fix it or give me any info, and I had the highest shared hosting plan available. I was getting really frustrated, so I decided to look up HostGator’s cloud sharing and optimized wordpress hosting.
Looking at reviews around the net, it seemed like HostGator was far better than Site5 in terms of performance and up time. However, HostGator was pretty much universally hated for their support. I quickly saw why. Almost immediately I ran into problems. First, I asked their tech team to transfer my website because I couldn’t log into FileZilla and use FTP. The cPanel file manager wasn’t really working either. After about a week, someone got back to me and said they’d start transferring my site. Later on that day, they said the transfer was complete, but it wasn’t. Almost all of my images were broken. Plus my website would give me a blank white screen when going into the dashboard. A week later they fixed the media issue, but there was still a number of memory issues.
It took HostGator’s team about six days for them to respond to my support ticket each time. I tried Live Chat, and they helped me identify some problems, but they said only the techs through the support ticket could fix it. So I went back to waiting. Some of the techs blamed some plugins, and some blamed my theme. I had disabled all plugins at one time, went to a default theme, and contacted my theme editor. Eventually, at the end of the first month they completely shut down my website because they said I was still using too much memory and it was affecting other users on the shared plan. I had bought their highest tier package for optimized wordpress too, and my site isn’t that huge or memory intensive. There was definitely something else going on.
The support team started giving me advice on how to optimize my website to allow it to go back online. Unfortunately, all the articles they gave me weren’t helpful because it either required my website to be online or I needed access to cPanel. Apparently HostGator’s optimized wordpress plan doesn’t give users access to cPanel, which is insane!
Before I reached the 45 day mark, I asked for a refund from HostGator, went back to Site5, and did a few of the optimizations that were recommended by HostGator’s support, plus some I had found while going through countless articles. My website seems to be running a lot better and smoother than before, but there are some things I need to tinker around on that I’m not too familiar with.
Now that my site seems to be stable, I plan to add a ton of content that’s been on my to do list. Much of it is written posts of videos I’ve done on my YouTube channels. Others are brand new material. Keep an eye out for everything coming in the future!