My server is having a temper tantrum here, so if you’re subscribing to my feed you may have seen a few duplicate and wonky posts lately. Sorry about that. Stupid stupid stupid WordPress. It’s like my own blog is conspiring to keep me from blogging here.

Well maybe.

It all depends on how the upgrades go tomorrow. My hosting provider (Hostgator) is upgrading all their servers to PHP5 and MySQL5, meaning one of two things could happen: either I’m fretting over nothing and the upgrades will go smoothly, leaving my precious blog relatively unscathed. Or…

There’s no telling how all the components of my site is going to react, but needless to say I’m a little nervous. I’ve backed up all my files, but if some major part of my blog is not compatible with the new server, then I am totally up poo-poo creek without a paddle.

Honestly, I just don’t have the strength or patience anymore to deal with a major meltdown. I’ve exhausted all my energy trying to keep my blog running as smoothly as possible, and if it all goes to crap because of this upgrade, that might just be the end of this site as we know it.

So, should the worst happen, I bid you all farewell. Goodbye, you cruel, cruel Internet! You’ve taken a once young promising lad and reduced him to a shriveled up ball of insanity, bitterness and despair. Damn you!!!! Damn you all to the fiery flames of LOLcats hell!

I’ve been using Hostgator to host my blog for a little over a year now, and I think it’s finally safe to say they’ve proven to be a reliable shared hosting service, so much that I decided to become one of their affiliates. Although I’ve never received hordes of traffic to see how well it could hold up under heavy load, I’ve never had trouble with my site during those times it’s gotten stumbled either (where it’s received hundreds of visitors within a short period of time). My highest peak was when I had about 130 active visitors to my blog at once (and still the server merely yawned). Tickets to help support for one reason or another have always been promptly answered, but my best experience had to be when I was having trouble logging into my WordPress admin one day. I first spoke to someone via live support, who tried his best to resolve the issue on his own before having me open up a ticket so a sysadmin could look into the problem. In the space of about 20 minutes, a systems administrator named David had me up and running after learning that a problem with my Akismet plugin was causing my blog to lag. After I deactivated Akismet and replaced it with a newer version, I was up and running again.

Customer support that’s responsive and knowledgeable, a shared server that remains fast and suffers virtually no downtime, all for an easy 10 bucks a month. I really can’t ask for anything more. They also offer a semi-dedicated solution that’s still shared but where you’ll only share a server with 3 other users, but for some reason they don’t offer any VPS solutions (yet). Regardless, they offer excellent packages for your hosting needs, and in fact mine recently enjoyed a free upgrade (due to Hostgator adding new hard drives to the server I was using).

Word to the wise though: the web hosting industry has had a history of embellishing the bandwidth they claim to offer to potential clients, but what many people don’t know is that such bandwidth will be limited by the server’s CPU and memory resources. Unless you have a vanilla site, you’ll likely never be able to reach the high bandwidth ceiling many hosting services provide because your site will be shut down long before then, due to using too much of the server’s resources. How much you can actually use will depend on the service, and such info is usually buried somewhere in the terms of agreement. Read Hostgator’s Terms of Service and then compare it to other hosting companies for a better idea of how much freedom you’ll have when purchasing a shared hosting account. Regardless, based on the report of other customers, even people who have been slashdotted or dugg have never had a problem with taxing too much of the server. Just make sure you build a good site that’s optimized well (with caching abilities if possible) and you’ll likely never have a problem with Hostgator.

Sign up for a Hostgator account today!