It's been a little quiet over the past week a, but not through conscious action. Having decided to re-launch a site and get things going again, I was feeling pretty happy.
Problems around the corner?
Unfortunately, almost everytime I checked in on my site, I would find that the whole thing was hanging and often generating a 500 Server Error - not a good place to be if I was trying to build a new site and hopefully begin to get some traction on here. Sending people to a site that was not doing anything is not the best way to get them to come back again.
Solid Customer Service
Customer support were good at the hosting company. They looked into and let me know that I was spinning up far too many processes and that was what was causing the issues, apparently. It was likely to be a faulty plug-in and therefore I would need to disable all the plug-ins on the site and try again.
Or is it?
As a new site, there weren't a lot of plug-ins running and those that were had been running ok for about a day before the issues started. I wasn't 100% convinced that it was actually the plug-ins causing the issue.
What else is out there?
After a long time with the original hosting company, I decided that it was time to look around to see what else was out there, especially in the WordPress hosting side rather than .net hosting that I had been using them for.
Lots of research later, I narrowed it down to one of two options:  SiteGround or websynthesis.  They both seem to have their advantages and fully tricked out SiteGround is not that different cost to websynthesis.  However, coming from an IT background the standout feature for me on the SiteGround offering was the option to have a staging server.
Staging Server? - SOLD!
I'm new to setting up a WordPress site. Â There will be many things that I want to try out and test. Â I want to be able to experiment with different ideas, themes and layouts until I find the site that I want Solutions Reality to be. Â An ability to use a staging server that I can dynamically create, whenever I need one is a major win.
Unreal Customer Service...
One of the other excellent, stand-out features of SiteGround is the online support chat that they offer. Â If you have a question then fire up a chat window and within 2 minutes, someone will respond. Â This happened when I was still investigating which new host to go with and has continued while I have been completely reconfiguring my site and migrating from the old host to the new.
Over the past week, I reckon I have needed to contact Support maybe 20 times and everytime the team has been excellent.  I have migrated mail, configured SSL, set up and migrated  a WordPress site.  I've needed to configure FTP accounts, sort out access to MySQL and to be fair, every question that I have asked, I have had an answer within 20 minutes, except for the actual migration of the WordPress site itself - that took a little longer, but you would expect that.
Solid Foundation
I think that with all the optimization and customization that SiteGround offer I now have a solid platform to work from and can start to try and build my platform to get my message out there. I'm no longer worried that the site won't be there when I or my potential users come visiting. Having turned lots of optimization on, the platform is ready - now all I need to do is actually get on with populating the content!
Disclaimer
I have included referral links on the links to SiteGround as that is something that they offer. This has been a genuine review from someone coming cold to SiteGround as a Company and I believe that you should praise where it is due. This post has been my way of trying to say thanks to them for making what could have been a painful migration actually almost pleasurable. Thank you.
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