If you noticed, this is a new blog. I started blogging less than a month ago, using free blog at wordpress.com. Pretty soon, I realized a limitation, which caused me to look elsewhere to host my blog. I am still pretty happy with the wordpress software itself. After some investigation, I decided to take up a cheap hosting plan. Which was a big mistake.
Lesson 1
Don’t take up a cheap hosting plan before at least some online investigations. Find out from others who have gone through the same path, where the best deals are. There are plenty of forums discussing the subject. In hosting, the cliche “you get what you paid for” is extremely true. I find my initial experience with my cheap hosting extremely frustrating. The connection was slow, and frequently interrupted. An email to customer support was replied pretty quickly (which was good), but it was a non-answer.
Fortunately by then, the speed has improved, and the interrupted connections have reduced significantly (though not totally eliminated). My guess was, someone else in the same shared server was doing something with pretty high load at the time.
Unfortunately though, I have wasted a good part of the weekend suffering through the problem with nothing to show for it.
Lesson 2
Don’t purchase more than one month worth of hosting, unless you know it is going to be good (for instance, someone you trust recommended it). This one was a no-brainer, after the fact. I got pulled into the almost shady sales pitch, and signed up for a year. Once committed, it’s next to impossible to back out and get your money back.
Lesson 3
In general, keep your website portable. Make sure you always have a local back-up copy. I read some horror stories in the forums about people losing everything when the hosting company went bust.
Lesson 4
This one is related to lesson 3, but applies to a wordpress blog. After putting in place the wordpress installation, I proceed to move my contents. And immediately discovered that wordpress don’t support (yet?) direct port of everything from one host to another.
Now, someone familiar with wordpress might point out the import/export function. But, as far as my google-fu skills went, I found this function worked only for blog texts and settings. It failed miserably to properly move embed pictures. Compounding the problem, the slow hosting I got was making it extremely difficult to upload any picture at all. My guess was, the server can barely handle the load of the sql database, but I don’t really know the real reason.
In the end, I have to reduce the size of every pictures to the lowest possible. Wordpress.com, while absolutely free, was fast enough to handle them, but the cheap hosting wasn’t. Then, I ftp’ed the pictures to a dedicated directory in the server, and manually change each embed picture in the blog to an img link. This not only reduced the load on the server, but also made it easy to back up the contents and move the blog to another host in the future. I would simply need to move the entire pictures directory at one go, then use the wordpress import/export function to move the rest.
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