I have had a terrible time in the past few days. I can’t convey the entire experience to yhostgator.jpgou, but I will outline the bare bones of it. It all started when I got an email citing ‘abuse’ from my Web host provider.

They told me that due to too much traffic I had outgrown my hosting plan. Note the word ‘abuse’ only occurred in the subject header of the email. I had already been thinking their package was a little expensive, so these strong-arm tactics to get me to pay more meant that thoughts of moving my websites began to take form.

I discussed my plans with a close friend of mine online, Deb, who is a moderator over at SEO Best Practices Search Engine Forum. She suggested I try HostGator, and after looking into it I decided to go ahead since I would be getting so much more for the same money–a full 30 percent more bandwidth per month for one thing.

Everyone expects to have a period of troubleshooting during such a move: the more websites you have the more trouble you should expect. I only have five websites to move, but I had a ton of trouble for several reasons, chief of which are:

  • I didn’t plan it carefully enough. As usual I just launched myself into it, lol.
  • I didn’t enlist the help of expert friends early enough. I got myself into a real tangle first, which meant they both deserve medals for taking on me and my problems.

Here’s an excerpt from the email I sent Deb very early this morning, announcing my final triumph:

I’m giving myself a huge pat on the back, but humble thanks go to you and Spence. I have just got the blog working at last: http://www.blog.marketmou.com I have been hours and hours troubleshooting, and in the end, even Spence, who installs WordPress for a living, had difficulty pinpointing what was the trouble. I got myself in such a mess. In the end though, he did a wonderful job and really helped me out. I’d still be troubleshooting without him, even with the help files on the WordPress forum.

I had the wrong files in the blog. I dunno how that happened, but they were for a diff site altogether. That meant my original files had been deleted when i repointed the domain over at XXXX (I did try repointing them back again–too late). But the good thing was that, thanks to you and your expert intstructions, I had downloaded correct versions of the SQL databases. This is the critical thing with a blog. So I uploaded fresh WP software to the website along with the theme, and reconfigured it all. At first it didn’t work and we had that pesky problem again where the domain was automatically redirecting. I discovered that somehow, the addon domain, marketmou, was also created as a sub-domain and that was the problem. I deleted that (with great trepidation), made some changes to the permissions inside the php and presto: it works. I still have to finish uploading my plugins and my scripts, but on the whole it’s working.

I’m telling you all this so that you’ll know where I’ve been and what happened to my blog for the past three days, and also in the hope that my experiences might help other bloggers in some way. I really love the interface over at HostGator, it’s pretty and intuitive. When you spend so much time in there it has to look good! :)

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