Thanks to the worst hosting company in the world, this site had it’s lowest traffic day ever yesterday, pulling in a record low 198 page views from 85 visitors. It was down due to a password reset and database error from yesterday evening until just after noon today, so I’m not expecting today’s stats to be too great either. On average, Stak Loaded receives about 500-600 page views from 150-250 visitors, so this is a drastic decrease. I also made less than $1 from Adsense which is totally ridiculous.

I recently advised my readers to switch to 1&1 due to their superior hosting solutions and free Adwords vouchers, and now I’d like to emphasize that even more. 1&1 is the best shared host I’ve worked with, and Host Gator (the company that’s hosting this blog) doesn’t even compare. I’ve had problems with them before (check out this post for info) and this is definitely the last straw. For some reason my password was automatically reset yet again Continue Reading »

I use 1&1 to host a lot of my smaller (MFA, landing pages, and random bullshit) sites. The best thing about it is it lets you have unlimited domains from the same hosting account, and you can register your domains through 1&1 which actually works surprisingly well and makes it really easy to manage your sites. This is why I use it for all my low traffic sites, and right now I have 8 domains using the same server. All this, plus they give you a $50 Adwords voucher, $50 Yahoo voucher, and $100 MSN voucher upon signup (for the “Business” plan, if you get the “Home” plan those vouchers are cut in half), which is already more than what you’re paying for an entire year of hosting.

Before I started Stak Loaded, I had been hearing a lot about HostGator and how great it was, so I decided to try it out and see how it compared. Their plans give you more space and more bandwidth than 1&1 AND at a lower cost, so at first it appears to be a much better deal. However, that’s where the fun stops. HostGator only allows you to associate a single domain with any hosting account and charges you a fee if you want to switch domains after the initial signup. Their customer service is usually pretty good, but compare that to the fact that I have no idea how good 1&1’s customer service is because I’ve never had to use them.

If you tried to access this site earlier today, you probably noticed that it was down and there was a HostGator error message in its place. This is because HostGator decided that a lot of their customers had weak passwords and they wanted to reset everyone’s passwords so we would change them to be harder to crack. This is probably the stupidest thing any web host has ever done. The reason my site went down is because Wordpress needs to be able to access the SQL database on the host account, which requires the password Continue Reading »