When all your hopes go up in flames

I’ve just read an interesting post over at betshopboy.net about his blog going down over the festive period.  This was due to an unfortunate tale where he bought his domain and hosting from a reseller – miriguy.com.  Miriguy does apologise in his latest post, but I’m guessing this didn’t quell the anger that betshopboy was thinking when he was sending emails to his reseller with no support or communication.

What you should learn from this

• Backup, Backup, Backup – although betshopboy did backup, if he used the WP-Backup plugin, then he would’ve gotten a file emailed to him daily – pretty nifty if this happens, though I’m not sure if he used this plug-in.

• Research the people you’re buying from – I use a web-based domain look-up tool to do research on a lot of domain name holders, sometimes to have a nosy to see if they have any other websites, or to see what hosting provider they’re using.

• Make your browser start page your domain page – If you make your domain or blog URL your start page when you load your browser, then you will quickly become aware if your site is down or not, and then quickly resolve the issue.

• Use a reliable hosting service – There are many hosting services around, some I’d recommend are: 1and1, Dreamhost, Fasthosts and Bluehost.

By reliable I don’t mean cheap and it is true that you get what you pay for with a host.  I’ve read a couple of bloggers who’ve had their set of hosting problems in the past.

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