I have shared my website hosting story on a prior occasion, where I told you how I decided to do it myself when a web developer from Bangalore asked me to pay an amount which I thought was too much for the job.
But I was an IT professional by background and I had a handle on technology in general already. So, when I started hosting my first website, as an entrepreneur, I didn’t have much difficulty in catching up with WordPress.
I started by hosting my first website with GoDaddy and it was great. I didn’t have any experience in SEO and therefore I had no expectations. I didn’t care how much time it took to load a page and if I recall, snigdhakrishna.com used to take about 35 seconds to load. Neither Snigdha nor I cared and as a matter of fact, no one ever complained that the website was slow.
Founding Krishna World Wide Team Changed Things
As Snigdha and I became serious about starting our own enterprise, we partnered with a few exceptional people and founded Krishna World Wide Team. That is when some of our team members (these are the people who knew stuff) brought the issue of SEO and showed me how badly our websites were doing.
Since then, the change started in our approach to managing our websites. We spend a good amount of time and money fixing our websites, optimizing our websites for SEO, creating sitemaps and all those activities that we now do and recommend to our clients.
It was a huge learning curve and it was a lot of fun doing that.
As Our Needs Grew, We Kept Moving Our Sites
There was a time when I had about 12 WordPress plugins on this website and GoDaddy customer service was saying that my website was loading slow because I had too many plugins. So, I decided to move some of my websites to another web hosting provider and test it out. Turned out, 12 was not a big number for plugins.
Then I decided to try CloudFlare and it dramatically brought down my website page loading speed from 25+ seconds down to under 5 seconds. I was still not happy and my team kept trying different technologies to get better. Here is a screenshot of my current website pagespeed statistics using Pingdom (Considering the page size of 1.3 MB, I think it's good at the moment):
We were on shared hosting plans because I wanted to keep the costs down. We kept moving from one hosting company to another in search for the best place we could host.
Finally, I stayed for a good long period with InMotion Hosting. Their business hosting plan was really awesome for me. You may refer to my earlier post about my move to InMotion Hosting with a lot more information about that decision making process.
But earlier this year, InMotion Hosting began complaining about too much resource usage by my website. They said my website was using 200% of the allocated resources on their servers. I only had about 300-500 visitors a day at the time.
With some effort, we found out that it was because of the comment spambots who kept on invoking my wp-comments.php over and over throughout the day. Well, we resolved the issue through new .htaccess rules and tightened our security through CloudFlare to calm things down.
However, I decided that I didn’t want to deal with petty issues and therefore, I should have my own server which will not go down often. I wanted my own server where nobody would shut me down without my permission.
Finally, We Moved To Managed VPS Hosting
My awesome Krishna World Wide experts helped me identify KnownHost as the winner when it comes to fully managed VPS hosting. Many online entrepreneurs highly recommend their managed VPS services as well. So, I made the move.
Since then, it has been a joy ride. With optimal web server and MySQL configuration to support WordPress efficiently, our server has never given up no matter how much traffic we get on any of our websites.
In addition, we have an auto scheduled full backups that run every night to place a copy of the backup on the cloud. The server administration team at KnownHost does a great job and more than anything else, the server administration customer support has been simply fabulous.
This is what we needed. We found a place where we could relax on the web knowing that we have full control on what goes on our machine.
Yes, it is about 10-15 times more cost than it used to be when we were on shared hosting environments. But the peace of mind is worth the money. Now we can focus on business knowing that our websites are taken care of.
Powerful Servers, Managed Services – Happy Clients
Although I didn’t plan about it to begin with. However, when I saw some of my good friends struggling with their website management tasks, I offered to move their websites on my servers at a nominal cost.
Their main challenges were the same common ones that most people on shared hosting face. For example:
- Website goes down every few days due to some issue for some time (and sometimes, for hours).
- Some plugin breaks the website and customer support says, “We don’t support WordPress or third party applications.”
- Website is loading extremely slow and hosting company blames on number of plugins (sometimes there may be a genuine case though).
I knew some of my good friends whose websites had grown beyond the capacity of a shared hosting account, were struggling at BlueHost and Hostgator. They would spent hours trying to figure out small-small issues only to get more frustrated and they would wonder if it was the right decision to have a website in the first place.
So,when I offered my friends and assured that they will never have to worry about these technical challenges as my team will support issues like this, they were extremely pleased to move to Krishna World Wide servers.
To my knowledge, all websites that we host, are performing extremely well and we never leave our clients alone to investigate their WordPress issues. We take responsibility and work with them to resolve their issues hand-in-hand.
We have been providing this service to people who have come through referrals so far. We wanted to make sure we are able to develop a happy customer base to test out our support capabilities before we make a public announcement about our service. But the results have been tremendously encouraging so far.
Fully Managed WordPress Hosting Public Offer Coming Soon
I have received great feedback from all my hosting clients. We are excited to know that we, the Krishna World Wide Team have made a difference and we can be even more impactful in future. Therefore, as I write this, my team is working on a plan to launch a full fledge marketing campaign to announce a well organized and Fully Managed WordPress Hosting Service offering by Krishna World Wide Team.
We intend to offer this service to the entrepreneurs who are intimidated by the technical details of running a website. This service is also for people who don’t have the time or the energy to take care of day-to-day issues of WordPress and plugin upgrades, daily backups etc.
Our goal is to take your technical challenges away from you so you can focus on your strengths and build your business.
Keep watching for updates and the details will be out soon…
Have Questions Or Suggestions?
If you have any questions about website hosting or our Managed WordPress Hosting service offer, please use the comment section for asking your questions.
What are some of your challenges with web hosting services that you wish were provided by your web host? Please share some of them so I may benefit from your experience.
If you have any suggestions or thoughts, I would love to know what you think because this is how I learn. Please take time to share your thoughts through your comments and add value. Thank you kindly!
Hi Kumar,
I am not as technically strong about WordPress but I can understand the problems you shared. I am planning to start a website for my travel business and you have made me think about it.
May be, I should budget my web hosting a bit better because I don’t want to be struggling with backup, security and speed and all those things. Thank you for guiding us through your experience.
Thanks!
Thanks Satish. I think you will be excited when you launch your website with a premium service and what is exactly what my team is putting together. Thanks for dropping by and please do let us know if you would consider hosting with us.
Regards,
Kumar
Hi Kumar,
Ah.. this is a very sensitive issue at least for me, if not for other bloggers!
I did have my love-hate relationship with my webhost, HostGator. As you mention, my only complaint and problem with them is also that they’ve at times shut down my site stating high resource usage as the reason. And, in my case too, the cause were the spam bots. Apart from these incidents that happened a couple of times in the last year, I’m pretty content with my present host, where I too have a shared environment.
I researched about VPN, but found it too costly for my present needs. Getting a notice for overuse of plugins from GoDaddy when you’re using only a dozen plugins is quite surprising. I use double the number of plugins, yet my site sails smoothly.
W3Total Cache and CloudFlare have proved to be a boon to me too! They help dramatically reduce the loading speed of the site, free of charge! But I doubt the Pingdom speed results, as they vary greatly each time its used. Presently it shows my site’s load time under 3 seconds, but at times it was even under 1 second! (I know it depends on the selected location also) However, the speed in my Google Analytics and GTMetrix always differed from that of Pingdom, which I find is not realistic.
The most important factor certainly is the peace of mind when it comes to hosting, at an affordable cost. It’s good to know that you’re very happy and satisfied with your server and that you’ve been successful in providing more than satisfying services to your clients. I agree that technical challenges can be quite overwhelming for a non-tech blogger.
Congratulations and best wishes for your new venture and look forward to hear the details of your hosting plans! ๐
Thanks for sharing. Have a nice week ahead ๐
Hi Harleena,
I guess you meant “VPS” when you wrote “VPN” ? But yes, a good size VPS server itself costs at least 50-60 dollars a month plus administration is again a big headache. So, unless you are technically strong and understand behavior of UNIX systems, it may not be a good thing to go for anyway.
Having under 1 second of pagespeed is awesome and I do know (now that you also mentioned) how much CloudFlare helps in achieving that. They are simply awesome!
We plan to support the amazing technology from CloudFlare and manage these services for our clients as well (if they wish) among other important features.
Thank you for the words of encouragement and your testimonials. It definitely makes me feel that we are on the right track with this project!
Regards,
Kumar
Hi Kumar,
Well, I feel your pain and everyone else’s as well.
I had my own issues with Bluehost due to me using too many resources as they told me because I was being hit by bots as well. Even after moving up to a more expensive service, not the VPS because I was told if I moved to that service I would get no support, it didn’t help.
So I eventually moved to another hosting service and for the most part things are good. I have had a few issues with their server problems but I’ve never been told I have too many plugins, not even when I was with Bluehost for five years.
I get a lot more resource space with this new service because they’re a smaller company and not as many people on the shared hosting account so for now I’m good. I think everyone would love to never worry about this ever again but I think that’s just part of blogging.
What you’ll be offering sounds wonderful and I have a feeling you won’t have any problems getting customers.
Have a great week.
~Adrienne
Hi Adrienne,
You did the right thing by moving to a smaller company. This is the best thing to do so you can get attention when you have a problem and a much better customer service when compared with the giants.
Spambots have been a real issue and even with so many HTACCESS rules, I am still not able to block them all. I don’t think anybody can as these guys are really sneaky! And they do consume a lot of our server resources.
Thank you for your words of encouragements and the wishes. I definitely think I can use some ๐
You have a great week ahead as well!
Regards,
Kumar
Hi Kumar,
Well it is good to know that you have a great hosting company. So far, I haven’t had any issues with mine, but one never knows! I’ll certainly bookmark this just in case mine gives me trouble.
In business, we want to have things running smoothly. If things go down, and plugins go haywire, that takes so much of our time to try to fix. I have absolutely no patience for this! I’m not a do it yourself kind of gal and I like to go with companies that have good customer service. To me that is the important thing.
Now that I’ve bookmarked this page, if things go wrong, I’ll be coming to you. Why? Because you have the experience and know how about these things.
-Donna
Thank you Donna for taking time to share your thoughts and I am glad to know that you have been having a good run with your web hosting company so far. It should always be like that ๐
Well, I had it for a while, but like you said, things started to interfere and we needed to make these adjustments.
However, now with full control on the server, life is awesome and that is the reason it made sense for us to launch a service that can make our clients worry-free. We are still in process of making the final announcements but I know for sure, my goal is to amaze my customers with world class support and more!
Regards,
Kumar
Hi Kumar,
It’s good you found a good hosting company. I actually found a little known one a while ago and they have been great, and supportive and so far after a year, no issues or problems. I love that about them. Host Duplex it’s called. Anyway, glad you got your issues straightened out.
Continued success.
Barbara
Hi Barbara,
Glad to know that you have had a good hosting experience with Host Duplex so far. It is a blessing to have peace of mind fe technical standpoint while running an online business.
Thanks for sharing and have a great week!
Regards,
Kumar
Hello Kumar,
Awesome article for anyone having these issues you have outlined!
You know the hours and hours of wasted time I spent on the phone with BlueHost. Even recognizing the problems I was encountering, they still insisted on me sending a written complaint, even though the senior technician I was talking to could easily have rectified the problem then and there.
You kindly switched over my site to the new server, and I am glad to say, those problems are a thing of the past.
Kindest Regards,
Bill
Thank you Bill. Your worries are things of the past now:-)
Hi Kumar,
There are definitely some advantages in having your own hosting. Back in May, just as I was in a middle of a move (a literal house move) my hosting had shut down all my sites because I was using too much CPU. This was really a shock to me, but what can you say, they are always right and we’re always wrong. Those are the issues we may run into when we are on shared servers. Eventually that got fixed, thankfully.
Then more recently, as I was telling you on your other post, I deleted a post by mistake and they didn’t backed it up, because according to them I am over some type of limit where they do offer courtesy back up, really.
As I was telling you also, my plugin back up doesn’t work either, so right now, no back up! I wonder if self hosting would be what I should head for.
Thanks for this great post, Kumar.
Hi Sylviane,
Not having a backup is a dangerous situation to be in. Not just having a backup it having it in your hands (a cd, in your Dropbox etc.) is vital.
Can you imagine what happens to your website if FBI shows upset your hosting company and takes the exact hard disk you are hosted on because they suspect some activity by some other website hosted on the same server?
Trust me, it has happened with people. You want to protect your asset and your hard work from things like that.
If I can be of any assistance, please do let me know.
Regards,
Kumar
First of all I would like to congrats you for such a great initiative.
I do faced many different types of issues in past with wordpress, you know better than me ๏. If you remember recently there was some wordpress issues which was showing XML file instead of image while preview. I proudly say, you helped me fixing all such issue since I started blogging.
I know you spend restless day and night to fix issues not only Krishna world wide and Gauraw.com but also with many others site including mine.
These days I can see my site (guptaranjan.com) load time is increased, I hope switching my site to new server can help. Thanks for sharing your experience and best luck for new vision.
Hi Kumar
I had a few problems with my HostGator shared hosting account a few weeks ago after installing a CDN service.
It caused a huge spike in my CPU usage and my site got limited but I didn’t really get a great customer service from HostGator.
I asked them if they could identify what the problem was and pointed out what I thought it was but I wanted to know for sure before I did anything.
It took ages for a response to come back and in the meantime, I’d done something about it myself and managed to rectify it.
When they did finally respond they advised that the solution I’d put in place had sorted out the issue so they weren’t going to look at it any further. What I wanted them to do was to help me with the problem in the first place.
Still, I’m reasonably happy with HostGator. One day I’ll have to move to a VPS I’m sure but for now, the cost is too high.
Hi Tim,
Thanks for sharing your testimonial. As a matter of fact, HostGator isn’t obligated to look into WordPress issues and if they did say they will look into it, mostly because they were being nice to you ๐
I had the same problem as I mentioned about my problem with comment spambots causing CPU usage spike. They at least looked into log and told me that it was my wp_comments.php file which was consuming most resources. And just like you, I had to self-serve and dig into it. I am glad you found the problem and you were able to fix it. Most entrepreneurs won’t be able to (and many times, they don’t want to) do it themselves. For those people, I decided to launch a managed hosting service where issues like this will be taken seriously and customer will not need to dig by thmselves to find a solution.
Regards,
Kumar
Hi Kumar,
Congratulations! You’ve really taken a bold step to make sure that you get the best out of WordPress and a really kind one to ensure that the whole world of WordPress users benefit from this generous service of yours.
I’ll be following your updates and would fully appreciate any information that may aid my decision to join you.
Kind regards and a great week ahead!
– Terungwa
Hello Terungwa,
You are right. Indeed it is a bold step. By then, we must do what’s right and we must offer what is needed in market to succeed as entrepreneurs.
I see that many people are giving up on their blogging career because of this challenge and I could help. So I decided to offer this service.
The updates and the final announcement for our service will be out soon.
Thank you for the words of appreciation and please wish me good luck ๐
Regards,
Kumar
Hi Kumar !
Best of luck with your new hosting services . I agree that pagespeed time is very important part of SEO . As search engine crawlers won’t spend too much time on a website , its very important for webmasters to make sure that the website loads quickly . To do this choosing the best hosting service is very important .Thanks for sharing the information.
-Pramod
Hi Pramod,
Thank you for the wishes as I definitely need it. I have tested the service by hosting a few friends in blogosphere but opening it up for wider audience is a big project. I could definitely use so luck ๐
Have a blessed weekend!
Regards,
Kumar
Hi Kumar,
Very inspiring post, thanks a lot for sharing this. I currently own a website that is in wordpress platform and being managed by a hosting company that offers me a cheap and reliable price. If my contracts which is 1 year to that hosting company, Can I move to a managed vps? How is it done?
Hello Jenny,
If you are happy with your current host and you are able to self-manage technical aspects of your website, you may not want to move your website to a managed service provider because it won’t be a cheap option although it will be much more reliable no matter what.
However, if you have issues dealing with WordPress errors, breaking plugins, backup issues, security problems etc, then you need to consider managed WordPress hosting simply to have a peace of mind. It will cost you at least a few times more money than it does when you are with a shared host, but it’s the value for which you pay.
If you choose to move on one of my Krishna World Wide managed servers, we will take care of your move as well. But, if you choose to go with any of the other managed WordPress hosting services, they will also help you move your site (some will charge you and some may not – it depends).
I hope it clarifies your question and if you have any other questions/concerns, please let me know and I will be glad to help you.
Regards,
Kumar
Thanks for sharing. I definitely understand the struggle with a growing needs and having to adapt your site and servers.