Podcast Episode

176 – My Journey Through 6 Different Website Hosting Providers

Announcements

  • WordPress 3.8.3 Maintenance Release is available
    • Fixed a bug with the Quick Draft tool in the dashboard
  • WordPress 3.9 RC 2] is available
    • 5 Dozen changes were made in WordPress core
  • Heart Bleed bug has caused chaos in the past week to many hosting provides.
    • It’s also a great time to change your passwords to all of your online accounts.

Tools / Plugins

Great Responsive Site Tester for determining how your website looks on different sized mobile devices.

Listener Feedback

Daniel J Lewis wrote in with a recommendation for Ian from Episode 166
Diamond MultiSite Widgets
Building a Magainze Style Homepage

My Journey Through Hosting Providers

GreenGeeks

  • Pros
    • Typical shared hosting plans
    • Less than $100 per year
    • Live Chat
    • One Click WordPress Installs
  • Cons
    • Sites run slow
    • Servers are oversold

ServInt.net

  • Pros
    • Site ran much faster
    • Support was great
  • Cons
    • Were not WordPress experts
    • No live chat

WPEngine.com

  • Pros
    • Free
    • Dedicated WordPress hosting
    • Caching and backups are done by them
    • Staging area
  • Cons
    • Couldn’t run Pretty Link Lite plugin

Rackspace Cloud

  • Pros
    • Glorified shared hosting plan
    • Could create hosting environments for clients
  • Cons
    • Websites ran slow
    • Interface was clunky, not typical cPanel, which was slow too
    • Hard to bill clients

Amazon EC2

  • Pros
    • Website was super fast
  • Cons
    • Everything had to be configured, nginx

Flywheel

  • Pros
    • Website is super fast
    • Dedicated WordPress hosting
    • Great admin dashboard
    • Hand off charges to clients
    • 2 weeks of “free” hosting for dev sites
  • Cons
    • Initially hard to set up because of database prefix

Amazon S3

  • Pros
    • Cheap – only pay when people use it
    • Helps you to stay flexible with your hosting company
    • FTP access to folders
  • Cons
    • It’s another service you have to pay for
    • Peter_Ingersoll Reply

      Dustin,

      Another great podcast. You’re definitely one of my must-listen-to podcasts.

      I am considering FlyWheel and wanted to know how you’re staging sites. I think you had podcast about this previously, but I’m not sure if it applied to your current host.

      Thanks for any info. 

      – Peter

      Apr 24, 2014
    • dhartzler10 Reply

      Peter_Ingersoll  Hey Peter, currently I’m staging my site locally using Desktop Server. I keep an identical copy of my site on my computer at all times.

      I’m following all the steps listed in Episode 166: http://yourwebsiteengineer.com/166-push-local-changes-live-wordpress-site/

      Apr 25, 2014
    • Chad Warner Reply

      Thanks for this, Dustin. I’ve been re-evaluating hosting lately, so I listened to this episode again. Then, I signed up for Flywheel! It’s only been a week, but so far, so good.

      Apr 25, 2016

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