Moving my Wordpress Installation

I'm moving my Wordpress installation to another webhosting company once again! It's one of those things, sort of like shifting house for one reason or another. Migrating the entire website is no easy task. Especially if your website is as complicated as mine!

Though I still have another 5 months of hosting left, I decided to move it earlier as I foresee I will be busy with work and other matters for the next coming months. Even now, I can't seem to find the time to blog about my favourite things. Anyway, will just have to do a better job on time management.

My personal website has been on a stand alone budget web hosting. I decided to migrate it to my other shared web hosting and save some cost. There is perfectly nothing wrong with Cynet web hosting, it is really cheap and yet very stable. You could customized your hosting requirement based on how active is your website. If you needed more storage or more bandwidth, just upgrade to higher hosting solution. I have been using it for 3 to 4 years, but decided to consolidate my various websites (and save some cost too).

My blog website is down

Just my luck. Cynet the web hosting company is experiencing server rebooting. No wonder my website was so unstable! I thought it was a Wordpress plugin that I recently installed causing my entire website to crashed. But I couldn't log in to my hosting control panel too! Panic! I thought no way my plugin cause so much trouble! After submitting a support ticket, I found out that Cynet is experiencing unstable server issues.

In their own words,

One of our server currently in unstable issue that keep rebooting.

Date: 09th November 2011
Time: Since 01:00AM

We are still checking on the root cause.
All user website hosted under server (setali.cynethost.com) will keep experience a short downtime at this mean due to server keep reboot.
We will keep you next update as soon as possible and sorry for any inconvenience caused.

 

UPDATED PROGRESS

Date: 10th-November-2011
Time: 01:00AM

UPDATE:
The server still in unstable stage after we have update and reconfigure the server after 24 hours. We are now do a checking on hardware part by part and replace it if any problem found.
All user website hosted under server (setali.cynethost.com) still will keep experience a short downtime at this mean due to server keep reboot.
We will keep you next update as soon as possible and sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Thank you.
Cynet Hosting Team

Oh, well...
 

[update 11/11/11]

My website is back! But... I think Cynet used a previous back up, because my latest post as well as some maintenance update were missing! The maintenance I could do again, but the post! Argghhh...! I have to rewrite all over again. I didn't keep the Word document after posting it. Waste of my time writing and posting it!

Thumbs down from me for Cynet Hosting. I know, I know, this really budget hosting only costing me RM45 per year, so don't expect too much. Then again, the web hosting services are very competitive and there are many good web hosting companies out there. Aw, shucks, just too bad for me that it happened while I was making a post. Other than that unstable server situation, Cynet web hosting has been pretty decent so far.

Can't seem to install statusnet

Ever since Bluehost wasn't so friendly to my statusnet script and wordpress bad plugins causing server spike in their hosting server, I shifted my personal blog and other web projects to another web hosting company. I still wanted to experiment with Statusnet but now try as I might, I couldn't get it to install. I wonder what is wrong. I even downloaded an older version of Statusnet, but it was no go. All I got was 500 internal server error.

Granted the hosting was very cheap. I think Anjung Cafe Hosting is the cheapest paid hosting that I have ever come across. Of course the cheapest would be free hosting but that is a different class altogether. Nobody can provide free all the time, they need an income to maintain their hardware and provide for themselves too. Funding must come from somewhere. Even bloggers also need funds, it takes time and effort to research and write. Some small measure of returns via advertisement to fund for domain name and web hosting and a little extra for a treat now and then isn't asking too much, no?

Anyway, I wanted to experiment with Statusnet but it just wouldn't install. Mayhaps will have to try it on another web hosting company and see if I get the same error or whether it would be smooth sailing. Could be the way the Apache / Linux server is configured. Since I'm just renting the hosting space at such low cost, cannot expect too much from it lah! (update: yep, I could install it on other web hosting, so definately Anjung Cafe Hosting is missing some plugins, so no Statusnet installation here for now.)

Will have to find time to blog about the various Malaysian web hosting that I research on while looking for an alternate to Bluehost and looking for hosting space closer to home. Especially for those who want lower cost hosting at good value, no need to go so expensive like Exabytes with the unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. Although my personal blog has a lot of website traffic it is still within range of
the cheaper web hosting.

For now, I think I better not waste too much time trying to get my experimental Statusnet installation to work. I'm rather behind in my more serious web posts.

Bluehost giving me the blues, looking for new web hosting

Eversince Bluehost gave me the heartbreak of telling me if my script cause a spike to their CPU for the third time, I will have to find a new web hosting company. I think that is rather stern and unfair, rather than chasing the customer away, they should try to help resolve what was wrong with my script installation. After looking around online, I found many negative reviews about Bluehost. And some place the power failure incident as a major negative point against Bluehost. Believe me, when all my web sites went down that day, I too had to wait it out for their servers to reboot. And they talked about world class backup generators and they weren't working that day with the excuse the power companies didn't allow them to use it.

Another down point is that Bluehost is one of the few web hosting companies that throttle your bandwidth, that means if a certain increase load to their servers due to higher website traffic, it would mean your web site will start to slow. Searching online, I found a review where a user who was a teacher, complained that her Wordpress website slowed to a crawl when many of her students were accessing her web site simultaneously. And I bet that the number isn't very high considering that a classroom full of student accessing her website requires throttling?

My Wordpress website in Bluehost is down and out!

Oh, blow me down! It seems I got two script: Wordpress installation and Statusnet is causing Bluehost server to overload and they had to shut down my account which was a big blow since I have several website domains hosted on it. Whenever a script installation takes up too much server webserver resources it will impact on other users and thus the prudent thing to do is to suspend the culprit which this time looks like me!

For Statusnet, I was experimenting with it. Didn't know it was using up so much resources. This one was very easy for me to let go. I just deleted the Statusnet folder where it was installed and that was it. But that was not the end of it. My Wordpress too was also causing server overload, and this installation is very important to me as I am using it regularly to blog. It has 500 posts and does earn me some Adsense income though small it still something. Unfortunately I'm just as in the dark as to what is wrong with my Wordpress installation. And the only way to avoid getting shut down and getting my account terminated was to chuck out my Wordpress installation in Bluehost. Boo-hoo!

Bluehost was very strict with their TOS, and if I cause their server to overload the 3^rd time, I will have to find myself a new webhosting company! Well, maybe there is a silver lining in this predicament. Because now I have decided to look for a new webhosting company, perhaps one which is nearer to my locality rather than half a world away.

This time round I decided not to host so many website in one hosting account. Hey it may be cost effective to host unlimited multiple domains but if any one of your website caused an issue then all your other website will be affected. And if the webhosting company decided to terminate your contract, you will be in a big lurch to find a new webhosting company plus shifting all the data and reconfiguring your SQL database etc etc. Now that would be indeed a big disaster!

Since I still got an whole year's worth of hosting with Bluehost (I signed up a 3 year hosting plan with Bluehost as I felt their hosting plan and services was rather good despite being not the cheapest one around) and decided to continue with it till it expires next year. However with the above experience I have decided to split up my websites to several webhosting companies. Actually I'm already using another one, it is a good one, but I would like to try other web hosting companies too.

Locally we have Exabytes which is offering the same unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, but having have several websites, I think it is not necessary to have this kind of requirement. In fact you pay more when you can save with less. After all, how many of us average webmaster will ever achieve resounding super heavy website traffic? If you do and  you are earning good income from it most likely you will invest in an expensive dedicated web hosting in order to cope with the server load.

Since it is unlikely I will have such overly popular website, a shared webhosting will do just fine. Before shifting over to a new webhosting company, I checked the server logs and see just what amount of bandwidth and storage required. Then looked around for a suitable cost effective hosting.

For now, I will just be shifting my JanLeow.com website. When my hosting with Bluehost will be due next year I guess I will be moving out from Bluehost. Well it has been a good many years of usage with them, but in the end I have decided there are better offerings elsewhere and decided to give other webhosting companies a go.

 

Bluehost down time again?

Now this is getting to be to frequent. I'm getting very sporadic website uptime. Something better be done about bluehost down time. Or they might just find I will be one of the many disgruntled user who may just consider migrating to another web hosting company.

Bluehost is down due to power outage

OMG! This is the worst case experience I have with the Bluehost webhosting service I had for years. It is probably unfortunate that Utah in USA had a power blackout. My main website domain has been down for several hours already. Fortunately my website setup is rather complicated as apart from my usual blogging on Wordpress I also setup blogging using Google's Blogger as well as other website like Yola, Bravenet, Google Site, Tumblr for experimentation. So some section of my website is still functioning. Strangely I don't know why the DNS was affected causing my other addon domain in IPserverone to go down as well. Which means all my forwarding email from that server would have ground to a halt!

It's been several hours already and my website on Bluehost is still down. Guess it is going to take longer before getting restored. I found out about Bluehost status from Twitter, so looks like Twitter is quite a good source of quick information. Much faster than news release to be search on Search Engines.

Finally Bluehost also made some announcement in their helpdesk website:

helpdesk.bluehost.com

The Bluehost Helpdesk is currently unavailable and will be back soon.

There is a complete power outage effecting one of the Bluehost data centers, expected ETA is roughly 1:00 AM Mountain Standard Time.

Provo Power has requested that we shut down power while the transformer is being replaced. They are allowing us to use UPS power for the phone system. The other data center is unaffected by this outage.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Bluehost should consider setting up some kind of UPS as backup plan. Likewise in Malaysia where we often experience power blackout every once in awhile especially on a hot day where all the air-conditioner would be powered on at full blast, that put quite a strain on the power producers and usually very likely result in a power outage.

For mission critical task and services, a UPS power backup is a must. Hopefully Bluehost should consider implementing such UPS power backup as part of their overall webhosting strategy rather than letting their users in a lurch when such power outages happen.

Looks like I can't do anything to my main blog as well as several of my other website hosted on Bluehost including access to my cpanel control panel till the power outage is resolved in Utah.

[update]
Yes! My site is up and running again! Took a long while, the twitter updates from Bluehost says it is booting up their servers one by one and about 90% is onstream. Soon shall be 100%.