Welcome to Creative Curio’s new host! Had to switch again and it’s always such a hassle. Hopefully my new host, Bluehost, will work out better than the last one.
So far I am very impressed with them. I even got a phone call to confirm my account within 24 hours of setting up an account with them! I’ve had to open two help tickets so far and the service people I’ve talked with have been very knowledgeable, helpful and quick to respond. I’m very pleased so far.
If you could leave a little comment for me and let me know where you are (just country is fine) and how the site is working for you, that would help me to know if everyone is switching over to this new site. Thanks!!
Seems to be working A-OK here in Montreal Canada. :)
Great! Thanks, Hamish!! The DNS transfered almost instantly here. I was quite amazed.
another Canadian here
from Vancouver. Congrats with the new host. Good luck with it! Did John switch to this one too?
Thanks, Vivien! No, John didn’t go with this host (yet?) but he was talking about switching so I figured I’d better hurry up and switch my stuff so I’m not holding him back.
It also works across the pond :-)
All’s well in sub-arctic U.S.
Now that you have a spiffy new host, how about that new design?… ;)
Got the post in my reader, so works fine for me!
Looks fine to me; in fact, I’ve been using Bluehost myself for about six months and I’m very pleased so far.
All good. Good luck with the hosts and hopefully you have better luck than me.
Looks spot on in Scotland. Do Bluehost have one-click WordPress upgrades? I’ve never been with a host who offers that, and wondered what it was like.
Esben,
Thanks!
Alec,
Yeah, yeah… actually I’ve been working on the design a lot the last couple of weeks and I’ll be updating you on Friday. (Esben, you hear that??)
Kristy,
Hey! A new commentor! Thanks
paul,
Glad to hear you’ve been having a good experience with Bluehost.
Jacob,
Has your new host been treating you well?
You seem to have recovered quite nicely from your previous hosting problems
David,
Yes, they do have 1 click upgrades. I’ll let you know how that goes next time there’s an update. Installing was… well… I had trouble with getting my DB import, but that’s where their excellent support came in!
They have a new alternative to Fantastico called Simple Scripts, which is what I ended up using (installs WP, creates a DB and sets wp-config). But I had to delete the database it created, create my own empty one, remove the Create Database line from the exported .sql (got lots of snags leaving that line in) and then reconfigure the wp-config to match my new DB. I also had to change the line that pointed to where my blog is (options table, siteurl line). Changed it back via the WP Admin settings once I switched the DNS to Bluehost.
Anyway, wanted to share that in case anyone else is having problems installing WordPress with Bluehost (nice keyword phrase there!). But like I said, tech support was extremely responsive (less than 5 minutes one time) and knowledgeable, the cPanel is really easy to use and overall I am very, very impressed with them. And you can’t beat all this for $6.95 USD/month! I’d definitely pay more for this kind of service.
Nice keyword phrase indeed.
Thanks for the insight. I’m happy with the support I get from both ICDSoft and Crucial, but always good to hear about other hosts.
ohh I hear you! If you want me to look at anything, just poke me a mail
I just found the best looking website in the world, it have one flaw, but thats about it http://textism.com/
ooh I just noticed.. all the images from your posts is gone :-/
David,
Yup, and if you ever need to switch, I’d go with Bluehost. I’ve been with 2 other hosts for my blog (one of which was Media Temple and they were horrible… my site was down 4+ times for extended periods in 6 months) and I’ve had the best experience with Bluehost.
Esben,
That site is certainly easy to read. Thanks for noticing about the images here. Not all of them are missing, but it looks like some didn’t get transfered (FTP timed out a couple of times and I guess it didn’t resume the way I thought it did). So thank you very much for the head’s up!
Yeah my host (Solid Internet) has been ok so far. I wouldn’t say great but they have been good. I am on a US server now that has unlimited bandwidth which I need (I am up to 60GB this month) and I am paying $16.95 per month however they are quite fast which is great. I wish that the server was in Australia but the price of bandwidth here is so high.
If Solid Internet lets me down, Media Temple is second on my list or maybe another Australian company.
Jacob,
Media Temple is who I just switched from. Speaking from my own experience, I would NOT sign up with them. I know other people swear by MT, but I had down time too often, and since I was on a reseller account, I couldn’t reset my server even though they could see my site and all other sites hosted on that server were down. They would not reset without admin authorization. That seems very unreasonable to me. It might be wise to research other large volume hosts and see what reviews say about them.
Thanks for the tip.
Coming up fine here from New Zealand, with stable ping of 155ms with very little jitter, which is right up there at the sharp end for U.S. sites from here. For statistic’s sake:
—- creativecurio.com ping statistics —-
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 155.501/156.516/157.361/0.509 ms
To give you an idea what things are like way down here most sites return 200-230, with a few in the 180-200 range. With our site (mothership.co.nz) we get 145 which we are rapt with (and it took some looking!).
Jacob, We’ve been with MediaTemple for a while now, and it’s been remarkably good. There was a database issue once that was fixed in a couple of minutes, but apart from that, it’s been fine. Pings are excellent (see above) and data and traffic limits great. If you are looking for an Australian host, we have heard good things about Jumba - http://www.jumba.com.au. We don’t have anything with them at the moment so can’t say from personal experience, unfortunately.
We also have clients with zzhosting, and the uptime has been awesome. Support was a little lacking for a while, until we worked out our emails had ended up in their spam collection. Since then it’s been ok!
Karl,
Thanks for the data. It sounds like my site is functioning really well for you and I’m glad to hear that!
As to MT, like I said above, I know others have had a fantastic experience with them, but I think for the kind of money they charge, they shouldn’t have ANY down time! What else would you be paying for except up time? Storage space is virtually not a problem any more (no pun intended).
You make a good point regarding uptime. I came across a lot of good and bad feedback regarding MT, and only put one site across (one of ours) first off to see how it fared. It’s gone well so far, and they seem to finally be getting on top of their new method of web hosting, so hopefully the worst is behind them (and us customers).
The reason why we decided to try it is because sometimes we’ll be mentioned on various sites here, and traffic goes through the roof (we’ve also been slashdotted a couple of times, and survived). The idea seems a sound one, which hopefully works out in practice.
Karl,
I wish you a better time with MT than I had, for sure. If your company is a web host, why don’t you host your own sites? I’m not trying to be irritating, just wondering…
We do. We have colocation servers here in NZ, Aus, and US. However, we need to host our own site somewhere else so if something happens to one of our servers we’re still contactable. We gave the option to a few chosen customers re: MT and scalability, and a few took it. It’s a little spread out, but it has worked well for us so far.
Karl,
That makes complete sense. Good thinking, too!