December 4, 2007

Cheap Hosting - You Get What You Pay For.

Learn from My Latest Hosting Experience

Firstly, please accept my apologies if you've arrived here to find all my previous posts - posts I've published over the last 2 PLUS years - All disappeared, gone, poof. I can assure you that I am a zillion times MORE upset about this than you blog readers. But I do sympathize with any of you who've been coming to AffiliatePowerTools regularly over the years - You expect the content to be where it's always been.

Let me explain a little about what happened and HOW. And I hope in the process, you'll learn a valuable lesson and prevent this from happening to your blog.

To begin, and in my defense, I'm a very busy affiliate marketer, webmaster, and web consultant. AND I'm a one-woman show. I do outsource various chores and jobs - but for the most part I manage my entire internet business myself. I currently have several HUNDRED domain names registered in my name, have 177+ domains LIVE and actively receiving web traffic, manage and/or publish to nearly 40 Wordpress blogs, and also have a growing client base for website/blog seo consulting and installation.

So when I decided to move all sites OUT of all four cheap hosting accounts and over to one of my more robust VPSs, I figured that I'd get that accomplished over a period of a couple months. NOT!

Stuff happens in life… things we don't plan on or anticipate. And 'stuff' got in the way of me getting started moving my sites out of the cheap hosting accounts. In fact, 4-5 months went by before I started.

With a total of close to 110 domains spread accross these 4 cheap hosting accounts (about 30 sites per hosting account), I started moving the sites very systematically - One account at a time. Every domain had at least ONE blog, so I meticulously backed up databases to make restoring the blogs on the new server failsafe. I mean, I'd done this a zillion times before with other hosting acounts, without a hitch. Why should this be any different/

Moving everything went fast and smoothly enough. I had my db backups in hand. And now the final step was to restore the databases using the db backup files for the blogs in their new location. I THOUGHT I was set. But…

I didn't take into account the LOW resources at the cheap hosting service that I was moving these sites from. Much to my chagrin, I discovered several database backups were NOT complete - a result of the cheap host timing out, running out of resources, or more simply … crapping out during the db backup file creation. Now, luckily this only happened with the blogs that I've been posting to for a LONG time - blogs at least over a year old.

But guess what, readers? Affiliate Power Tools just happened to be one of my OLDEST blogs, and with over 2 years' worth of posts neatly tabled in it's database… backing up this db was just too much for the cheap hosting account's overworked and underResourced server.

Oh I tried this and that… and if I'd realized that the db backup was SNAFFOO, and realized it early enough, I'd have had a couple other options to save/restore the database for this blog, complete. But I didn't. I closed the cheap hosting account before I realized the db backup was bad. And that was all she wrote, literally.

So folks, in a sense I'll be starting over here - New posts, new articles, new techniques - But that isn't necessarily a bad thing. And I do have some of the original blog posts archived on my hard drive, which I'll put back up on Affiliate Power Tools as I find them. I needed to update Wordpress and Semiologic Pro software anyway… so now it's done. Looks like we'll be going into the new year with a clean, fresh Sem Pro install and completely new look (a facelift) for the blog.

But let this be a lesson to all of you. When it comes to saving a few dollars on your business costs, hosting is NOT the place to go cheap. Your websites/blogs ARE your storefronts and if people can't get into your store, OR they come and find your store empty, a barren wasteland… well, you know the outcome. No sales. No return visitors. And an even worse cheap-hosting scenario, you could LOSE your storefront alltogether and have to rebuild it from scratch.

Like me, with Affiliate Power Tools.

Choose your hosting services wisely.

What hosts should you use, you ask?

I've tested and used countless hosting services over the years, and I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. Right now I have 7 different hosting accounts - 3 VPS, 4 Reseller. I stay with these because they have given me the best ongoing service, uptime, and server performance compared against the other hosting services… Yet the pricing is very reasonable, in most cases just a few dollars more than the cheapies. The hyperlinks below will reveal what hosting companies I use.

I have Four (4) Failover Hosting accounts with ResellerZoom. Not to be confused with their budget reseller hosting plans, I do NOT recommend going 'budget'. The Failover hosting service is still quite an affordable hosting solution with robust server performance even loaded to the gills with jam-packed domains.

I have Three (3) VPS hosting accounts. Slightly more cost than ResellerZoom's Failover hosting, but the hosting plans offer more - more bandwidth, file space, access to server/control. You'll be able to get more domains on one hosting account. The only limit will be server resources. And a quick support request can get your VPS scaled UP in memory, bandwidth, etc within a few minutes.

You can't go wrong with either one. However…

If you're just starting out, I would recommend going with Reseller Zoom's FailOver hosting plan. It's fully managed and lacks the slight learning curve required with VPS.

On the other hand, if you're about to reach your current hosting plan limit and are looking for another hosting service, I recommend you look into the VPS hosting service (this link will also lead you to a nice discount). This VPS hosting is also 'managed', but that means something a bit different with VPS and Dedicated hosting.

If you go with VPS, I suggest you hire a server tech to secure and harden your vps for you, before you start loading your websites onto the server. I use a great server tech by the name of 'G' - If you go with VPS, I'll give you his contact info. He's very knowlegable, reliable, and doesn't charge much.

Now… where did I save those original blog posts on my hard drive …

Article by Affiliate Power Tools

Tags: robust hosting, reliable web hosting service, compare website hosting plans, reseller hosting, cheap hosting, vps hosting service