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Lessons Learned From a Bad Experience With My Web Host

Posted: 26 Oct 2009 03:21 AM PDT

Last October 23, 2009, my self-hosted blog The Extraordinary Kiddo (http://bryankarl.net) went down. I thought everything's fine as after some few minutes, the blog went up again. Then I went to sleep. The next day, boom, blog's already suspended. It was the same (and I prayed it would be back to normal) until Sunday. I emailed my then web host (Kinohost, owned by Jon Towns) and got no reply at all. They're a waste of time so I decided to move on. Here's the complete story.

I've been through a lot because of such incident. I was thankful enough I do everyday backups of my database. I have only one backup of my files and it was one month ago but that's better than none. So here, lessons learned:

Choose a "reliable" web host. Reliable is relative. Reliable can either mean great customer rating/feedback, higher uptime, brand, speed of customer support, features, etc. It all depends on you. On my case, I'd go for the speedy customer support. Why? It irritates me much if I can't contact people from my web host. Now, my new host is just run by someone in the same country as I do and contacting support can be through Yahoo! Messenger or SMS. Easy.
Do regular backup of your database. There is an automatic database backup feature in WordPress. All you've got to do is configure it to send daily/weekly backups of your database to your email. Yes, email. No hassle.
Do regular backup of your files. You don't do this everyday. You just can't. Files always come in huge sizes and it would be burdensome to download them all everyday. Weekly backup of files can be good. Monthly is okay. But if you hate waiting for everything to be downloaded, maybe you could choose which parts to download. As the author of iFancy.Me states, the most important files you need to backup are: plugins, themes, wp-config.php and .htaccess.
Monitor your web host status. You could check how many times a month the server goes down. Or maybe you could check on irate customers. Do some simple Googling. You would find out if similar clients are praising or trash talking on your web host.

After all those, I've now recovered. And I changed domain name so please do link my main blog up. It's http://extraordinarykiddo.com, The Extraordinary Kiddo. By the way, my new web host is iRock Web Hosting Solutions, owned by a co-Filipino. Hope I won't be having problems with my new host.

Have you had similar bad experiences with your web host?

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