Blog Potions

I am maintaining several domains under one hosting account with Dreamhost and I haven’t got any problem with that until yesterday.

As I start to browse one of my blogs, I got a “Forbidden Access” error on the index page. I checked my other blogs and the same error message shows. I thought it was only due to my browser or my current location that causes the error until some of my loyal readers informed me that they’re receiving the same error. I logged on to my hosting control panel to submit a ticket to my hosting provider when I noticed this flash notice on their site:

In a way, I felt relieved that there really was a known general server issue and not just something particular to my account (Read: Hacking!). Fortunately the problem only lasted a few minutes in the morning and another few minutes in the evening.

It then came to me a sudden realization. When you’re running a several domains, it would not hurt to distribute them to at least two accounts or two different web hosts. So when something happens to a domain or two, the others could still be running smoothly. This could also help in the loading speed since every domain would be sharing the same CPU capacity on a single account.

I was backing up my files on one of my blogs through FTP download when at one point, the download was interrupted for a reason I didn’t know. A few minutes later, my index page was garbled and the inside pages were Error 404. I tried to reinstall my Wordpress software but to no avail, the update/install files were still Error 404. Even my host’s auto-update function was not able to do the job so I realized it was something related to my mySQL database. Fortunately, my web host have multiple backup of my databases so the recovery was not much of a pain. Though I lost my recent update (which is just a newly published Contact page), the rest of my entries were fine.

In a few days (or weeks or even months), I will move some of my domains to other hosting providers. Not that I’m not happy with the support I am receiving Dreamhost, I just want to give myself and my domains a better security so I still have other blogs to work on when these kinds of problems occur in the future.

I’m currently okay with my Dreamhost solutions. And as compared to my previous Netfirms account, Dreamhost is definitely better. I’m currently checking reviews for Hostgator and Bluehost. If you’re using one of them or any other hosting provider, please give me your valuable opinions. Thanks!