I
’m writing this post almost two months after my last post but it frankly doesn’t feel like it’s been two months. So much has happened with TechWhirl and other parts of my life that it all seems like a faint memory rather than around sixty-days.
Since my last post, TechWhirl had just pulled off a pretty good April Fools Day promotion. So good in fact that we melted down our hosting company, which was BlueHost. As a warning, BlueHost is really good for semi-pro stuff but if you ever expect a visitor spike past 1000 people per day then watch-out because ol’ BH will start “throttling” your account but won’t take the time to send a note to say it was happening. I started noticing that our site numbers were leveling off and that we were getting some pretty funky errors in Google Webmaster Tools. One morning, I looked into the error log and then clicked on a button called “Throttling” in CPANEL and my world changed. My priorities changed from “gee, let’s do some business development” to oh F-U—- I grabbed a digital bucket and started bailing.
How’d I bail? First I started turning off a lot of functionality, reaching out to BlueHost and thinning out our displayed images. But, frankly it didn’t help so I found another company who shall remain nameless, which offered “Managed Hosting” and promised great service so we loaded up the truck and moved the entire site to them. Skipping ahead a little, I solved my throttling problem only to have it replaced with my site being managed by idiots and morons, which seemed to have trouble with the most basic requests like “please don’t upgrade the site during the middle of a Wednesday because that’s our biggest day” only to find out that they’d pulled the trigger anyway. F#@Q$Q@#$Q. Rinse. Repeat.
So, on May 14th we moved to a new hosting company who are famous for customer service, have clients far, far bigger than us and do only WordPress. I may have a hosting-crush at this point. They’ve been awesome.
Our site numbers have started to recover and I’m finally getting to spend my time reaching out to companies we could help if they promoted their products on us but I’m on a list dated April instead of June. That’s okay. Geez it’s only contracted commitments to sponsors we’re talking about here. I am finally starting to sleep again, which is nice.
I think our hosting and tech issues are behind us. Or, good gracious please let them be behind us so we can focus on really building the company rather than playing technician every day.
