Aug 02 2009

New Web Hosting for Smittysholdings

Category: General Web News — Smitty @ 4:27 pm

Hello Everyone,

I have just moved my website from another hosting company. I found that the older hosting company kept making changes to their security and OS that caused changes in my website due to programming issues that worked fine when I implemented them. A nice e-mail notifying clients of changes would have been extremely helpful.

When I found a problem – like  one of my RSS feeds not working and  asked if anything was changed – the standard answer was  “everything is working on our end”.  Without taking the time to ask the other engineers if the OS configuration was updated or modified. It turns out that they implemented a security feature to block incoming RSS feeds to my website. And to top that off – they also blocked my own RSS feed from my WordPress to my Home page – ON THE SAME DOMAIN!

Needless to say – I have been displeased by all this extra time I had to spend trying to figure things out and forced to deal with these issues that were brought on by the hosting company. I know no hosting company is perfect, but after a couple of years and the recent unexplained changes – I had enough.

I spent time looking at many other hosting companies out there and there are some good companies, I made a choice.

I went with Host gator – I like their support, pricing and features.

http://www.hostgator.com

Several other positive things came out of this which I shall add to this story. There are a few useful website tools – that can help figure things out.

Albertra.com – allows you to check (from multiple locations) the access and current status of your website. You can see if your website is up or if you are having a problem with your local ISP.

http://www.alertra.com/spotcheck.php

Another useful tool is Proxify.net.  Proxify.net is a web-based anonymous proxy service which allows anyone to surf the Web privately and securely. I use it to test to see if my website is working.

http://proxify.net/

I also use Network-tools.com

http://network-tools.com/

This is a great tool to check:

  • Ping
  • Lookup
  • Trace
  • Whois (IDN Conversion Tool)
  • Express – (runs mulitple tests in one shot)
  • DNS Records (Advanced Tool)
  • Network Lookup
  • Spam Blacklist Check
  • URL Decode
  • URL Encode
  • HTTP Headers SSL
  • Email Verification

Even if you have the best optimized website in the world, website hosting can ruin your rankings. If your web hosting is problematic, slow or offline on a regular basis, it can effect your rankings.

Monitor your website, check all the web pages, especially if you are using programming, feeds and blogs.

Good Luck.