It was with great hesitation and procrastination but I finally decided to cut DragonBlogger.com over to a new hosting provider last night. The whole process took me about 7 hours start to finish, starting at 6pm AZ time and finishing by about 1AM the following morning. I just had too many outages and too much conflicting information and poor support from my previous hosting provider that I had no choice but to switch.
My wife had been using HostMonster for about 4 months and she has not had a single outage on her sites (all 3 blogs) since cutting over, I cut over my two smaller blogs on MLK day and they haven’t had a single outage in a week and a half. Meanwhile DragonBlogger.com took a 6 hour outage yesterday due to something causing a huge memory leak on my old hosting provider, and this was the last straw for me.
Now all of my blogs are using HostMonster which is a shared hosting provider, I did have a Virtual Private Server (which gives you dedicated RAM and CPU), but I was not happy with the support and issues I was experiencing which necessitated my switch. There were some initial bumps but most of these were due to learning the new hosting provider and how to configure and tune my blog properly.
First off the bat, the WP-HTML-Compression plug-in for wordpress broke my blog on HostMonster, I was getting the following error with this plug-in enabled:
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.
Disabling that had my blog working, but I was having performance and pageload issues. It turns out FastCGI was the problem and limited to only 5 simultaneous connections, I switched my blog to using PHP5 without FASTCGI and my blog started performing better right away. One other thing my hosting provider told me was to disable WP-SuperCache as it makes wordpress perform worse in most cases with their hosted accounts. I disabled WP-SuperCache and my blog became noticeably faster, so it seemed to help.
On the weekend I will go through and trim as many non-essential plug-ins as possible to try and improve pageload times again, as well as convert as many png and jpg files to gif’s on my homepage to speed up their load times as well. In the meantime, this site has been completely transitioned to a new database, web server, hosting provider with all files, plugins, themes, uploads (500MB worth of image and file uploads across my almost 900 posts). If you find anything amiss or not working, do me a favor and leave me a comment would ya?
-Dragon Blogger
