Rackspace is now the home of Hosting-reviews-exposed.com. Last month I did not get out as many posts as I had wanted. In part I had more work to do than expected, and I lost a member of my family. On the bright side the work came from someone that was not looking for the cheapest possible solutions. The extra work helped to go through the morning period, and I plan to bring something positive out of this tragedy. But while this was happening hosting-reviews-exposed.com was going up and down like a roller coaster through the month of December 2011 Hosting-Reviews-Exposed.com had been up and down 164 times. I have mentioned several times that I had planned to move off Mediatemple.net, but a support call was the final nail in the coffin with this company. More about that in another post.
Honestly there were a few other hosts that I had my eye on, one of which is a solar powered host out of California. But given how chaotic my schedule has been I wanted to avoid not being able to get a full review of this host, not to mention I am in the progress of actually finding a home. After all that was another reason I had got out of the hosting industry which was because I wanted time to buy things such as a car and a house. I got the Car back in late September 2010, granted car prices are not in state of change. But I think now is the time for a new home.
I wanted to go with a true green hosting provider because at heart I am a tree huger. While I have not mentioned this provider by name the solar host out of California it is not hard to Google them and see who they are.
But here is why Rackspace won the handling of Hosting-reviews-exposed.com. There was a problem with databases, and it was that rather annoying looking color bars that told you what was a popular post for that week. This widget turns out to be what was killing this site. It was something I was recommended, I grudgingly did it as it looked like an eye sore on this site. I was really looking for a rational reason to remove it other than having to say I disliked how it looked. But I was told that it would help traffic, clearly it did it cut traffic by 80%. Mediatemple did not find it, and frankly I was not happy with them using the word theory to mean fact. Not to mention they did a hatchet job to my site in the progress.
This is not an Endorsement of Rackspace
I have mentioned in the past that I was not particularly happy with Rackspace. But I have yet to mention why. My problems in the past had to do with the sales agents they had given me. When I contact them to get new service often there was a lot of feet dragging in the progress. The easiest way to sour me on a company is to give me one too many company representatives that take up my time. One of the reasons I hated dealing with sales and billing reps at ThePlanet, as they were not inclined to keep you as a customer.
Granted these days I have not dealt with a sales agent with Rackspace, but I have never had a bad server from Rackspace. Support is generally good; I do get the occasional bad tech that you will encounter from other companies. Remember though this is not unlimited $3.99 a month hosting. The hosting for Hosting-reviews-exposed.com is now costing me $150 a month, from the $40 at Mediatemple, from the $4 I originally spent at Godaddy.
Advice on WordPress for Rackspace Cloud users
The last two days hosting-reviews-espoed.com was only coming up 50% of the time, and would come up after a reload. The first 24 hours I had ignored Pingdom as I was a bit busy and thought that may have been the dns change. This turned out to be a php memory issue that I was able to correct by adjusting the values.
