Category: WordPress

Where are They Hosting?


During my research into a reliable web hosting alternative I had discovered Wikipopia (formerly Serversiders), but Wikipopia disappeared since and I found similar tools at Whoishostingthis and Whois Domaintools

So I’ve checked a couple of sites randomly to see where they are being hosted:

(Random) Updates

  • The reason I’m sharing this with you is that there are several pitfalls in the hosting trajectory. One of them is Load Time. With firebug I’ve tested the load speed of several sites mentioned above and am not really impressed. Some SEO guru claimed that every 500 miliseconds your site loads faster, your conversion betters 20%. So my focus currently is on load time.
  • I also found out that my Dutch hosting company is a reseller rather than a dedicated hosting company.
  • WordPress itself recommends hosting hosting companies. Plus recently it introduced Vip Hosting, only for the happy few.
  • Mashable and Techcrunch show load times up to 20 seconds! How come they keep being successful?
  • Booking.com, the online OTA (=On Line Travel Agent) has an amazingly short load time, less than 3 seconds. Moreover It feels slick. Same with Tripadvisor, the online review company about 2 seconds…
  • I prefer my blogs to be photo rich. Problem that causes is long load times. Since Happy Hotelier is now hosted in the US, while it used to be hosted in The Netherlands I all of a sudden see my page load time doubled or tripped. Probably because each tiny little file has to cross the Atlantic Exchange.
    I’m considering upgrading my hosting package to virtual cloud hosting, but that may be too expensive.. Another way is deploying images over a free or paid CDN (Content Delivery Network). But you could also consider to trim your blog in other ways. I’ve found some great posts in that respect:

    1. Speed Up WordPress – Ultimate Guide to make Sites Super Fast
    2. 38 Ways to optimize and speed your WordPress Blog
    3. It would have saved me tons of time if I had known this little trick on beforehand: Host Images in Subdomain

    .

Last edited by GJE on December 5, 2016

Back to Normal – Lessons Learned (Things Hosting Companies don’t tell their Customers)

I was panic stricken when I discovered Happy Hotelier was suspended by my Dutch Internet Hosting company. Were hours and hours of work possibly put down the drain? What amount of work involved the quick unforeseen move? I really didn’t have that amount of time available…Luckily we’re back to normal now…more or less, because the page loading speed is not what I was used to…

1) The Story they told me
They informed me that due to “They didn’t know what caused the problems” they were not prepared to host me any further on their shared hosting packages. I needed an upgrade to the next deal they offered: an approximately $120.- per months VPS plan…..Not in 120 years!
If I agreed to move the two main blogs over to another host they would block my two blogs permanently and would put my hotel site and other commercial sites back up immediately. Just when I was negotiating with the hosting company I was having several potential guests on another line claiming they couldn’t access the hotel website and wanted to make reservations…

2) The Solution
First question was: How to find a reliable host within a couple of hours and to move over the stuff (two blogs with together over 3,000 posts and approximately 45,000 unique visitors and 65,000 page views per month? I remembered having read a reasonably recent post from Yoast WordPress Hosting. Go VPS cloud hosting! Nice advice, but unless you are willing to pay $ 99,- monthly for a managed plan, you are facing a tremendous steep learning curve in implementing the thing. According to Yoast the second best thing is Westhost shared hosting. So after a live chat with a sales rep of Westhost, which is one of their nice features by the way, who claimed that they could handle the blogs in one shared hosting business plan and reassured me that they would try to help find an amicable solution when the load would prove to be too heavy.

3) What they don’t tell you
Apart from ten obvious things hosting companies don’t tell you (do read this nice summary Ten Things the Web Hosting Company didn’t tell you from Thai devellopers!), I’ve faced the following issues:

4) Do never register your domain names with your hosting company.
Yoast should have had this advice included in one of his two main articles.

There are several dedicated registrars out there who can do that.

I have made this mistake and have paid for that by heavy loss of traffic. When you transfer a domain name from one hosting company (or registrar) to another, it will take time! It takes at least 5 working days, but in practice more days. Also it has a relation with which types of domains are registered by whom. Westhost for instance does not register .nl domains…..and they don’t seem to be able to transfer an .eu domain correctly.

The reason you lose traffic is that when you move your site to a new provider, you can put a simple 301 redirect for your site on the server of your old provider. However chances are huge, that the links of your old site that are in the caches of the search engines point your readers to the wrong pages of your site and cause your readers landing on your site’s homepage only only, not to the page of the image, or keyword they found in their search. Consequently too long Happy Hotelier didn’t show a lot of stuff and was not completely accessible.

If you have a separate registrar for your domains, all you have to do is replace the two references to the DNS (Domain Name Servers) addresses of your old provider to those of your new providers. That also takes time, but is in most cases limited to 24 hours only.

There is another reason not to register domain names with your hosting company: They usually have this info on the same shared server as your hosting package…if that serer is wacky due to old software or being overcrowded, the pointing devices are down as well as I have seen several times happening with my temporary installations

5) Do make sure your provider has competent measuring tools in place!
My old provider apparently did not have top notch measuring software for its server configurations.
I must admit I haven’t discovered them at Westhost yet, but they do have CPanel to manage your account which has a bit of a steep learning curve in itself… and some items I can pinpoint more easily than I could at my own provider: Total traffic and total use of disk space.

6) When you move, preferably do not install a working WordPress installation on a temporary or a subdomain.
I had the idea to move the sites as fast as possible, apply a 301 at my old providers site. Wrong. I should have known this because I had to change server when hosted by my old provider. The temporary name I used then affected many image urls. They are still haunting me now after the second move and I have still manually change them in many posts (while I had been doing that already during a cou[ple of months this year).

Actually I didn’t realise when you upload your stuff to the server of another provider, you virally don’t move your site when your DNS details are pointing to the new server…..I tried to give Google notice of a move from my domain name to a temp domain name (a socalled subdomain which in this case read as happyhoteliertest.westhostsite.com…guess what? Google does not accept subdomains in their webmasters tools program…

7) I now use Pingdom, but they are not clear how to use their free measuring tool
Yoast somewhere claims that whenever your ISP takes your site down, you will lose SEO advantages. Even a 5 minutes down might cause you loss of Google traffic. I’ve seen several downs in my pindom screen the last couple of days. Even a blogging friend told me he wanted to have a look at my site, but found it down…However, Pingdom itself is not clear itself how many tests you may run under it’s free schedule.

8) Have several FTP clients in place.
Some do see hidden files, others don’t see hidden files. Some do permit grouped resetting of file permissions, others don’t. Part of the problem of non visibility of photos here had to do with the fact that the file permissions were too low. Being ale to reset file permissions by the map is far less time consuming than doing that by the file.

9) Be aware on the sequence the server in questions resolves
When the site was down, I quickly put up an apologizing static html page. However it took me some time and help from Westhost to realize that one server has a preference for index.php notwithstanding there being an index.html in your root directory and other servers don’t read the index.php file if there is an index.html file in place…..

10) Definitely delete W3 Cache from your installation prior to moving or reinstalling WordPress!
It has cost me a lot of time to figure out that several files belonging to the W3 Cache plugin could be interfering with the way WordPress operates….Sometimes it helps to download and reinstall a “clean” WordPress version…sometimes it helps to set permalinks to default, delete the .htaccess file in your WP root and then reset the permalinks to your usual settings.

11) Long live Firebug
Going through these moves, you should use Firefox and it’s Firebug addon, with firebug you clearly can debug WordPress installations because you can see clearly which elements of your site don’t load in the browser.

12)I’ve now ditched and replaced the professional multi language plugin here
I did this already at Chair Blog but now I’ve done it here as well.

This plugin caused so many errors and was taking much load time. You have the choice of putting translated pages into your WordPress database, which then you cannot handle anymore, because it inflates up to 50 @ 60 MB. Very inconvenient if you want to make a daily backup, as is my practice and as has saved me now in these unplanned moves….

The alternative is much lighter, albeit it only translates on a post by post basis and not on a page by page basis and maybe the SEO advantages pro claims are lost. So be it.

14) How the F** does WordPress handle photos and videos?
A long time ago there was a promise that version 3.0 of WordPress would solve all problems with photos….What I see is that be it WordPress itself or Thesis, the theme I use for this and other sites, causes photos I upload to replicate (and use server HD space) like F***ing rabbits. For each and every photo you get 2 or 3 in return…do we need this waste?

15) Provisional conclusions
Westhost has impressed me with their quick service (24/7!) and their chat functionality and price/performance ratio. Less impressed I am with their explanations on their site. I believe they need a hosting wiki. They have a forum, but forums are soo slow and soo nineties…They have hidden fees, because they charge extra for spam filters, that is like Hotels charging for WiFi access. Also they want to charge extra if you want your Whois id’s hidden….same category. Unclear is what their exact relationship with VPS.Net is, because I’m considering to go one step further and plunge into VPS.net cloud hosting. Chris Pearson of DIYthemes (thesis) also seems to be on a virtual cloud somewhere, but experimenting away has also made me wondering whether Thesis is the right theme for me, whether it is slow by itself….

Post Alia
I’ll publish this rambling first as it is. I may flesh it out later with links and so.

And: I’m really happy I found Nerd’s Eye View about bad blogging habits which enlightened the past dark days..

And: The photo features Yoast. It was taken at the first ever WordCamp in NL last November. It was one of my UFO’s (Unfinished Objects) to post here about the speakers at that fabulous venue. I’m geared up for the second edition, but am almost sure it will never beat the first edition. It also reminds me of posting here about the use of avatars which I have in my sleeve for a long time now.

The “Karate Kids” – Chris Pearson (Thesis) vs Matt Mullenweg (WordPress): 0-1 So Far

Picture by Daniel Larusso

Beware! This might be time consuming!

Yesterday I opened my dashboard and noticed syn-thesis-1 by Matt Mullenweg in a window – It’s a prerogative of some WordPress developers to have their posts in one of the WordPress dashboard windows.

Matt Mullenweg (@PhotoMatt) is the guy behind WordPress, the blogging platform software I use here.

Chris Pearson (@Pearsonified) is the guy behind the Thesis Theme that I use here.

Matt was referring to an audio stream of nearly an hour, kindly put together by Mixergy who tried to bring the two closer together.

To get a bit perspective and background you could consider to look at this interview of Chris by Mixergy (@AndrewWarner).

There is another connected read in a post #thesiswp by Jane Wells @Janeforshort, an Automattic member.

You can reed Tweets about it in the #thesiswp stream.

Chris “addressed” the matter without going into details of the dispute itself in an earlier post Solutions and Ideology

Unfortunately in the audio stream neither party clearly stipulates the issue.

What’s it all about?

WordPress is bound by the GNU GPL License.

Jane explained the issue to me in the comments to her post:

The uber-simple version: the WordPress license states that derivative code (based on WordPress, using WordPress core functions, etc) inherits the GPL license and must retain the user freedoms that the WordPress license guarantees. Chris uses WordPress code (in some cases directly copied and pasted from WordPress core), but is not following the rule of the WordPress license, and is instead releasing his Thesis theme under a restrictive license, which takes away the user freedoms that the WordPress license exists to guarantee. Basically, developing on WordPress has one rule by the license agreement: you can take our code for free and build on it, but any work that comes out of that and is publicly distributed must be made available for modification and redistribution just like WordPress itself. Chris doesn’t like that rule because the second part of it would allow other people to build on his work, and he doesn’t want them to be able to. So he takes advantage of the first part of the rule, and violates the second.

It is not about the money

Jane further explained:

As has been stated many times (and is in the license itself), the GPL issue comes into play with public distribution. If you create a theme for your own use and don’t distribute it at all, license isn’t an issue. If you create a work for hire for a client you should deliver the source code to them (which you do when you deliver the theme), but you do not need to append a license to it b/c you are simply delivering work for hire. Only when you engage in public distribution (make it available publicly via the web or other delivery mechanism, whether paid or free) do you need to think about the license. At that point, yes, your PHP theme code needs to be GPL, but you can license your images and CSS under whatever license you like in order to protect the intellectual property of your designs.

Why 0-1?

Listening through the audio interview with Matt I concluded Chris was angry. He wasn’t drunk as he stated somewhere on Twitter. He shouldn’t have been angry. By loosing his temper he lost it. He clearly didn’t make a cohesive case. The end of the story is that he dared Matt to sue him. I’m not sure a judge from behind his desk would be able to solve the matter in a way the community could live with.

Matt kept his calm and announced another weapon: He offers Thesis users to buy them a GPL compliant premium theme.

I might consider to take Matt up on that offer.

On another note: Is it mere coincidence that Matt chimes in after WordPress 3.0 was released that has many features and functionalities Thesis offered long before 3.0 was launched?

Update
The issue intrigues me from various points of view. Especially the fact that both characters are behaving more like trolls than sensible people.

I’m collecting some links here for further reading:

  • In themes are GPL too Matt posted a (part of?) a Software Freedom Law Center opinion on the matter already back in July 2009. Here he goes over the boundary in my view:

    • Even though graphics and CSS aren’t required to be GPL legally, the lack thereof is pretty limiting. Can you imagine WordPress without any CSS or javascript? So as before, we will only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible. To celebrate a few folks creating 100% GPL themes and providing support and other services around them, we have a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes.

  • WordPress Them Licensing by Ryan Boren (@Rboren), on the WP side
  • Thesis War summary by Ben Cook (@Skitzzo), on the Thesis side
  • A thoughtful article why the GPL does not affect a theme Why the GPL does not apply to Premium WordPress themes
  • A further collection of links on the subject: 32 WordPress Thesis and GPL links to help you formulate your own opinion
  • Matt Mullenweg Fouls his nest
  • @FrederickDing has a pleasantly insightful take on the matter in Tracking the ThesisWP matter

More to follow…

Paginator – Probably the best WordPress Page Navigation Plugin for the Thesis Theme

For me easy navigation of a blog is a very important part of blogging.

I’ve had a page navigation plugin here that showed the blog pages both before and after the posts that I have on a page or blog category. The problem with the plugin was that a newer version interfered on several levels with the blog and I had to keep an older version, but that older version also interfered with post editing. I really had to get rid of it and replace it with something else.

I’ve found another and clever way of page navigation: Not only via page numbers, but also via a scrolling slider. I thank Famous Bloggers Net for pointing me in the right direction. The plugin is the Paginator.

While using my prior pagination plugin I came to the conclusion that I used the top pagination much more frequent than the the bottom one. Other than Famous Bloggers does I would suggest to download the plugin via add a plugin in your WordPress dashboard and put the following code in the Thesis Hook Before Content:

< ?php if(function_exists ('wp_paginator')) {wp_paginator ();}?>

Don’t forget to check the “execute PHP on this hook” button.

Also don’t forget to put a number in the number of pages for the Paginator setting.

In this way you leave the Thesis navigation at the bottom in tact and you have a nifty navigation tool on top of your pages and categories.

Update
Probably I’m the only one that uses this feature the most on this blog. I still like it, but there is one caveat. If you are monitoring broken links with Google Webmaster tools you’ll notice the typical error that each first page does not exist…

Can you Build a Hotel Website solely based on WordPress software (2)?


I believe you can, and actually I believe this is the only way a small hotel or Bed and Breakfast should do it!

I’ve seen it being done and I’m in the process of doing it myself, albeit in a more or less triple jumpy way.

I’ve announced this as My Main Project for 2010 already in January. Therefor this is number 2 in what will become a mini series.

However I had started a lot earlier with a post Haagsche Suites – At your service. That post didn’t come into existence than after various trial and errors with installing the WordPress Software, various updates and an unfortunate migration of the site to another server. If you like, you can read What is slowing down the Site Transition?.

The major jump forward (or should I say giant or quantum leap forward?) dates from last week and past weekend and is fourfold now:

  1. I use the booking engine of Hoteliers.com for guests to book my suites. Last week with their help I finally managed to take the main hurdle. I wanted availability viewable from every page on the hotel site. Now the widget opens in the main body of the site and is easy readable. However, the downside is that I cannot use any other widget than that, at least no other widget that uses an IFrame, because both wouldn’t work anymore.
    Nevertheless: I believe every hotel should consider using Hoteliers.com They provide very good value for money and are a good counter balance to the other parties on the web who (re)sell your hotel rooms on the commission model. They are awfully costly for the hoteliers. In addition I believe those commission based room (re) sellers are among the largest advertisers on Google who make the fat company fatter and fatter. But I will go deeper into this issue in a separate post
  2. With the release and installation of Thesis Theme version 1.7 of DIY Themes it is much easier to create drop down menus to make navigation of your site simpler for your site visitors. However, I do hope with version 2 they will come up with alternative navigation possibilities, as it is my experience that users do not always understand drop down menues.
  3. In addition Thesis version 1.7 is written for optimal speeding up the load time of your site or blog and there is no other theme alike for fine tuning your site for SEO.
  4. Darren Cronian of Travelrants pointed me again to the Nexgen Gallery plugin for WordPress by Alex Rabe. I had kicked it out earlier, because it didn’t go well with the PHP – MySQL version of my service provider. Now it works fine. I have played around with the size of the thumbnails extensively: As long as it took to get a balance between loading time and visibility of the thumbs, because I believe a homepage should not be packed with images and other stuff. It should be the easily navigable point of entry to my little empire.

Speed Matters
I’m proud the landing page Haagsche Suites takes only 1.43 seconds to load.
I measure the speed with a FireFox addon, Firebug 1.5.3, a nifty little tool every Blogger should have. Not only does it show speed, but it also gives errors. Firebug also tells me I should do away with all those widgets that load faces, little avatars of those who visit my sites. I love to put faces to the visitors of my sites, but “No” Firebus says “You should kick them out”.
Therefore I have taken away already several of such time consuming widgets from here like MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog and some more I already forgot. Recently I found a nifty new widget on the BlogCatalog Site.
I have also taken away the Google Friends widget, in one way or another Google doesn’t succeed in being socially acceptable. Buzz Failed in my opinion and Google friends doesn’t do a lot either and takes tremendous amounts of time to load. Face Book on the contrary made a quantum leap forward wit it’s I’Like program, but the widgets I use here are also much to time consuming.

Final observation:
During the last couple of weeks I’ve been experimenting with another nice WordPress Plugin, Link Within which gives your readers suggestions for similar posts combined with little thumbs of those posts. My conclusion is that I will get rid of it again, as it costs too much time to load and isn’t as to the point as the similar posts plugin.

Update:
I thought to provide some good examples of blog based hotel sites for your consideration:

  • Chanters Lodge by @Richard Chanters does a good job with a self hosted blogspot based hotel site. He’s a frontrunner as he started out very early at the now closed Yahoo “platform”.
  • I mentioned the Witt Istanbul earlier here.Now they seem to have moved their blog part somewhere else. Curious to know why, but what a stylish site!
  • I found the Caro Hotel in Romania
  • Umi Hotels in Brighton, UK
  • Hotel Hana Maui

More will follow if and when you or I discover them.