Carolyn E. Cooper Communications
Westhost plus WordPress has been a winning combination
What’s the best hosting service for my WordPress site?
I get asked this question at least once a week. Best is a relative term dependent upon a lot of factors. Ask folks about the “best hot fudge sundae” and you would expect it to be one made with rich, dark fudge — unless you ask my friend Mary. Mary hates dark chocolate, preferring sweeter, milder chocolate. So my “best” is her “worst.”
Frankly, I recommend very few hosting services and nothing I haven’t personally used. Now I can comfortably and confidently recommend Westhost, especially for WordPress-based sites. So let me review my experience with Westhost and not 1, not 2, not 3 but 12(!) WordPress installations.
I’ve been very happy with my current hosting service for several years now, however… recently I started having some problems with my WordPress installations and permissions conflicts. In particular, I ran into the dreaded “image upload” problem and I haven’t been able to use the automatic updating features of various plugins and the new WordPress 2.7. Permissions problems like I was having usually result from the server set up. And to make matters worse, I had a large class starting where each student would need his or her own WordPress installation and make various changes.
After a bit of research on hosting services claiming to be WordPress-friendly, I decided to give Westhost a try. The prices are highly competitive, but not so cheap that I suspect a scam. In addition, the Winter Special gave me unlimited databases which would allow me to set up the 13 separate WordPress installations I needed for my students. The account sign up was very smooth and I got a prompt response with my account information. The account instructions were very clear and offered me several options for additional information. This may not seem important, but I have worked with far too many small business clients with horror stories of confusion that led to costly mistakes or delays. Clear instructions for changing the DNS, setting up mail accounts and ftp access for file upload was a good sign that Westhost paid attention to customer service.
How serious is Westhost about customer service? Well, I signed up for the account because I was wanting to catch a sale at my domain name registrar dotster.com and figured I do it all at once. But then I got slammed with work. A week passed and I hadn’t set up my Westhost account mail or site. The phone rings. It’s my Westhost account representative calling to see if there is any problem or if I need any help because he noticed I hadn’t even logged into my account since signing up!
Westhost uses a different control panel than I have used in the past. I have been using C/Panel on my other accounts, but it only took 5 minutes to get used to the Westhost Site Manager. It is very clean. The items most site managers want often are in the left-hand navigation. Things that are used rarely or set up only once (normally), such as applications like WordPress or Zen Cart, are under the Site Applications section. This may take a up to a few moments to load, because there are so many excellent tools and applications.
One thing that was a bit of a surprise is that MySQL and phpMyAdmin are not already installed. I discoverd this when I chose to install WordPress through the Site Manager. This was not a problem, however. The Site Manager immediately recognized that I needed to install MySQL first and then phpMyAdmin before installing WordPress and walked me through the steps. At one point, to test the system, I deliberately wandered from the process. But I didn’t trick the Site Manager! When I attempted to install WordPress without having completed the phpMyAdmin process, the Site Manager took me back to the phpMyAdmin install and then moved on to the WordPress installation. At first, I wasn’t certain I liked having to do my own MySQL and phpMyAdmin installation, but as soon as I started working with the programs I immediately discovered the advantages. I have full control over my set up! No more permission problems with my database driven applications.
Now what about a serious real world WordPress test review?
So now came the real test. For my class I set up 12 manual installations of WordPress, each with 6 Themes beyond the defaults and 3 plugins. Then I turned my students, some of whom had never used WordPress before, loose with administrative privileges! Each student had to make some changes to the various settings, create some content, add some media, find and install plugins with the “Add New” feature,change themes, and make some changes to the theme stylesheet with the Editor. Then they each got a week to play around making modifications on their own.
Everything worked like a dream! Download time for each installation was fast, no one had a problem with the integrated “Add New” plugin feature of WordPress 2.7.1. And the only person who had any problems with the Theme editor discovered it was because she’d installed the WP-Super-Cache plugin, so she wasn’t seeing any changes to her pages because they were being fed from her cache! One of the smart alecs in the class (there’s always one) tried to cause problems with his installation — huge file uploads, lots of random theme changes, dozens of plugins installed — but everything kept working beautifully.
I am now moving my primary web sites to Westhost and starting to test it with other CMS programs. So far, everything has gone smoothly. I have received concise, timely notices of any schedule maintenance to my server (and the time of the service has been ideal and no longer than 5 minutes in length). While it appears that Westhost is owned by a large parent company that maintains a number of hosting services, I have never felt like just one in thousands of accounts. Westhost has had all the feel of a high-quality, boutique service.
I can recommend Westhost highly for anyone looking for a WordPress-friendly hosting service, especially if they want to have multiple installations of WordPress or other CMS programs.
Oh, and did I mention the $50 AdWords credit for setting up a new account? Sweet! AdWords Optimizer here I come (I’ll be posting more about AdWords and Search Engine Marketing soon).
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8 Responses to Review of Westhost Hosting for WordPress Sites
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Thank you for the great comments that you have made about WestHost. We appreciate our clients and want them to have an excellent experience with us. It is great to be able to confidently tell a client that WestHost’s client service is unbeatable. The reason I can confidently tell a client about WestHost’s commitment to its clients is because of great feed back like this. Thank you for your business. Hope you have a great day!
I am looking to change hosts from Bluehost who is throttling my site. Are you still happy with Westhost?
Cindy, do you know why your site is being throttled? Is there a script problem or a php looping problem or a DDOS attack issue? Bluehost has a support page with suggestions on how to determine what’s causing the problem: https://my.bluehost.com/cgi/help/564
You may want to first check that it isn’t a theme or plugin issue that will follow you wherever you move. Not long ago I had to kill a plugin on another site that hadn’t been updated in awhile and was being used by spammers to re-direct traffic.
If you are still looking to move, I haven’t had any problem with Westhost beyond the usual heavy-traffic-on-school-holidays slowdown. I’ve been keeping an eye on my Google Analytics site speed data and the slowdown was all due to one page which was feeding some video from Vimeo (and even that wasn’t that slow). I’m actually creating 30 WordPress installations today for a class that starts this week, so I’m still quite pleased with Westhost.
I like to monitor any problems or complaints the services I recommend get, so I’ll check with Bluehost and see what they have to say.
Thanks for the question and good-luck!
Carolyn E. Cooper
Oh, I forgot to mention that the biggest slow-down culprit lately has been the Amazon Affiliate widgets. I’m switching all of them to individual product links (which get better results anyway) and adding Barnes & Nobel and other options when possible.
I noticed you had some Amazon affiliate links on your site and thought I’d mention it.
Thanks again!
Carolyn E. Cooper
Did not know about the widgets. I’ll have to search them down and turn them off.
I don’t know why it is being throttled, and more disturbing, at least 10 different Bluehost tech support people (I’ve didn’t start logging my calls until this went on for a few days) don’t know either.
One thought it could be two scripts from W3 Total Cache:
/wp-content/w3tc/min/da1c9d0f.618bd5.js1/15/12 12:56 PM
233017bytes
/wp-content/w3tc/min/dd69998e.67ceaa.js
1/15/12 1:03 PM
214783bytes
No answer yet to my questions on the WP forums as to which setting are causing this or what is running.
I submitted my site to Yoast. The money I’m paying is cheap compared to the time it has drained during the last three weeks.
Well, thank you so much, Cindi for being bright enough to be willing to pay Yoast for technical support. I confess I get tired of all the calls and requests I get from folks who freak at the thought of spending even $100 to maintain their business websites, but will waste hours of their time — and mine — trying to avoid professional services.
I also haven’t gotten any specific response from anyone.
What you may want to do is to begin shutting down, one at a time, the different scripts — particularly any that started running about the time Bluehost started throttling you. See if that’s making a difference. You could also spend a few dollars recreating your site on a different hosting service with a new test domain name to see if you are still having the problem.
I did work with a web development company who had a client’s account suddenly bring everything down because she’d installed some tracking code from an affiliate that began effective producing a Denial of Service attack. Even when they were able to isolate her account, it brought the server to its knees. The worst part was that she didn’t want to kill the code because she was getting referral income from it, but it was running all kinds of spam *through* her account.
Best of luck, Cindi. I’ll keep trying to get some more information for you. Please let us know how things are going.
Carolyn
Thanks for the review and info.. I can see it was 2009. I know I’m a few years late to this post
but the experiences I’ve had with WestHost support over the last 72 hours as a new customer would lead me to advise others against going with their service. It may run smoothly once it’s up and running but you learn a lot about an organization by how they deal with a problem…
Brent,
Thanks for the comment and feedback. Sorry to hear you had a problem. Since you didn’t specify what the problem was, I can’t really respond to it, however, I can say that I’ve been dealing with helping a student transfer her domain name and site from a local hosting service to Westhost and I have to say that the Live Chat support 24/7 has been a Godsend! Even when we’ve had hassles with the transfer because of the local idiots trying to stem the tide of fleeing clients by putting up obstacles, the Westhost Live Chat support team has patiently walked my newbie student through the hoops. I’m optimistic that she’ll have her WordPress-based, SEO-optimized new site up within 72 hours — which is simply the time it will take to get the domain transferred from her current host (who wanted to charge her $75 for accepting the domain name transfer!).
I’ve got 45 different WordPress installations on my Westhost account running as sandboxes for my students to play in and haven’t had any problems (even when some of them have done some incredibly dumb things like get themes or plugins from “bad guys” who bury malware inside the code).
I confess I still prefer to keep my domain name registrations separate from my hosting, especially after the hassles I’ve seen students and clients experience when they use one company for both and want to move their site to new hosting services. (And yes, my domain name registrar of choice is still Dotster.com). But all told, the 24/7 Live Chat and standard CPanel interface keeps Westhost on my list of recommended hosting services.