Wow, web hosting is something else!  I’ve been going around in circles this week.

Because I’m creating a lot of niche affiliate sites, I have hosting with a number of different companies.  I prefer to spread the sites around a little bit for the sake of inter-linking and in the event a server goes down for awhile.  That way, just some of my sites will be offline but not all of them.

Just after the winter holidays, Dreamhost came out with a great promotion, 2 years of hosting for around $20.  I jumped on it.  Later I realized that Dreamhost does not provide cPanel access.  They have their own system that is absolutely nothing like cPanel, including displaying traffic stats.

I figured it would be no big deal and I created a number of sites on Dreamhost, learning their system along the way.  But as I have gone along, I’ve come across more and more programs that will only work with cPanel.  Like WPManagerDX which mass installs wordpress in a flash.  I use wordpress for all my sites now and this saves a ton of time.  I’ve become aware of  other programs that only work with cPanel as well.  So I decided to move all those sites and to get another hosting account with unlimited domains allowed.

In the mean time, I have an account with another company that provides 5 unique IPs with your account to use for link building.  I have little good to say about this group so I’ll just refer to them as “NS”.  My experience has been that with 4 of the IPs the sites are either down or I can’t log into cPanel or I can’t connect via ftp.  If it isn’t one problem it’s another and it’s constant.  They’ll fix it and something else quits working.  I sort of feel sorry for them!

The person who created the hosting packages appears to be a really good guy and to have good integrity.  So, I hold out some hope that they’ll get past this phase, and turn into a valuable, reliable asset.  I had a total of 3 money sites on those servers and I moved them today, to avoid any further rollercoaster rides with them.

I did get some new hosting today, too.  I did lots of research and decided on FatCow.com.  Good price and good reviews.  I logged in and found they did not offer cPanel.  They advertised having a cpanel, and I clearly assumed they meant the same cPanel most other hosting companies have.  But, no.  Good thing they have a 30 day money back guarantee.

I ended up getting another Hostgator account.  I have had great service and uptime with them over many years and just decided to go with what I know, instead of being surprised by what some other company offers.  I can recommend Hostgator without reservation.  Boy do they have a lot of servers!

These are my current criteria for shared hosting:

1. They provide cPanel.
2. They provide a 24 hour telephone number for support.
3. They allow unlimited addon domains.
4. They allow unlimited MYSQL databases.

When I could finally get onto the NS servers last night, I notice huge files labeled “CORE” in all of my blogs.  After panicking about being hacked, I did some digging and learned the core files are created when an unstable plugin is being used on a blog and the junk it creates is being “dumped”, or the servers are unstable.  I’ve never seen that kind of file before and I have a ton of wordpress blogs, all using very similar plugins.  So plugins are not the problem here, unstable servers are.  I was very glad to learn I could just delete these files but was not surprised at the cause.

I apologize that this has gotten kind of long and probably boring.  I learned of another method for selecting niches and domains recently and I’ll talk more about that soon.

Until then, have a good one!

P.S.  One last point!  I have gotten VERY good at moving wordpress blogs from one server to another, so if anyone needs any help with this, contact me and we’ll see how I can help.  I can also set up and customize blogs very well too.  The first 5 people to contact me looking for help with a blog will be totally free.